Learning Materials
ENGAGE:
What are we trying to accomplish with STEM education and how can we apply the ideas from Daniel Pink's talk on motivation?
With STEM education we are trying to bring about students that are more specialized in their specific field and who have an overall higher sense of knowledge. So many students today can graduate high school without ever truly learning or understanding many of the topics and concepts that teachers try to teach them. With STEM education, students are more accountable for their own learning and are taught better ways to study and learn on their own instead of simply being lectured by their teachers with no real thought coming from the students. This website, http://drpfconsults.com/understanding-the-basics-of-stem-education/, does a great job of breaking down exactly what STEM is all about and it also brings up the important fact that most jobs today are extremely math and science based and how STEM will help prepare students for these types of jobs. We can apply the ideas from Pink’s talk by making the students want to learn for themselves and not just for a grade. This way the students will be working toward a goal that will not take over all of their focus and this will allow them to reach their full potential in school and also later on in their lives.
How might we apply his elements of a new business operating system to STEM education?
We can use this system in our classrooms by lessening the importance of good grades. Students shouldn’t be going to school just to get good grades, they should be in school to learn about things that will help them in their future lives and to help them grow as individuals. With the way schools are now, a majority of students are not getting the most that they can out of
their studies because they are focusing too much on the grades they are getting. If we could shift student focus away from grades and toward fully understanding the material they are learning, I believe we could have much smarter and more prepared students coming out into the real world.
EXPLORE:
How do these principles and practices relate to what you've learned from reading How People Learn?
These principles have built on what I have learned from reading HPL by driving in the importance of knowing your students. I learned in HPL that teachers need to know exactly how their students think and learn so that they can appropriately teach them. This was backed up by this video because the principles are all about giving students multiple ways of doing activities so that they get the most out of the assignments given. If the teachers don’t know their students and how they learn, then they will not be able to effectively set up lessons where everyone will be able to understand to the best of their ability.
How do these principles and practices resonate with the perspectives on STEM learning (e.g., conceptual change, models & modeling, social cognitive, situated learning)?
These principles and practices act on all of the perspectives of STEM learning and if you think about it, they should.
Each of these principles helps to engage the students and keep them focused by presenting the information in a way that is easiest for the student to understand. By giving them different ways of representation the student can see the information in the format that they prefer and this helps them understand the material better. The different ways of action and expression will also help them to work with the information and material given to them in a way that best suits their learning styles and will allow them to get the most out of their explorations.
How are the guidelines for UDL related to being a STEM learner? How about to being a STEM teacher?
These guidelines are related to being a STEM learner because the student has to want to learn and use the options that
are given to them by their teachers to find which they like best and help them the most. Even though the guidelines are given to the teachers, they still need to passed along to the students so that they can see the best ways for them to learn and get the most out of their education. The guidelines are related to the teachers because they have to be able to know them well enough to use them effectively in their classrooms and to help teach the students the best ways that they can learn and understand.
EXTEND:
The smart graphs are fun ways to get students involved in lessons and are also a great added visual component to help
students see what they are learning. It’s also very useful that the graphs come with lesson plans and student assessment sheets. This is helpful for teachers so they can see how they would use this in their own classrooms and how it would fit into their curriculum. I am really excited to see more and more of these types of resources popping up because they really are helpful for teachers and students. After a little searching on the internet, I also found this site, http://www.modernchalkboard.com/fractions-add-subtract.html, which has many lesson to use with students on a SMART board that can be used in this same way to capture students’ attention and allow them to interact more with the lessons. It is very time consuming and difficult to create these types of lessons so it great that those that are being created are also being shared so other teachers can use them in their classrooms.
Readings
In chapter 7 of MTV the author mentions a book by Robert L. Fried called The Game of School. In this book, Fried shows how many students are not going to school to learn but are going to school to get through it with cheap memorization tricks and little real thinking. This is very true in our society today and I even talked a little about this at the beginning of this blog when I commented on Daniel Pink’s talk. As a future teacher, it is important to realize that many students have this mind set when they come into class and my goal is to change their ideas of school toward actual understanding of material and concepts. This chapter explains how to do this by telling in detail the forces that shape the culture of thinking. While there are eight forces, I found two to be extra important. The first is modeling and I found this interesting because it doesn’t mean modeling in the same way that we have been working with it recently. In this section, it talks about the teacher being a good role model and enticing to students to think and work harder by following the teacher’s example. I took many history classes where you could tell that the teacher was not passionate about the material they were teaching and this led the students to also not care about what we were learning. This changed, however, in 11th grade when I took AP U.S. history and my teacher was extremely
charismatic and excited about every topic we discussed. He taught his lessons so that they captured our attention and kept it until the end. He also made us think deeply about events in history and allowed us to discuss why we thought these events happened and how we would have dealt with them if we were there. The amount of history that I learned just in this class was
almost triple what I had learned in all my other history classes combined and this is why modeling is so important for students. The other force that is important is routines. The other chapters this week showed tons of thinking routines for teachers to use with their students and these routines are very useful in the classroom. These routines show the students exactly what types of thinking are required of them and constantly pushes them to their highest level of thinking. A crucial part of using these routines is making sure that you continue to use them often. These routines are great for building students independent thinking and should be used for an extended time because, otherwise, if they are only brought up once in the classroom, the students never get the chance to see the importance of them or remember how to use them.
ENGAGE:
What are we trying to accomplish with STEM education and how can we apply the ideas from Daniel Pink's talk on motivation?
With STEM education we are trying to bring about students that are more specialized in their specific field and who have an overall higher sense of knowledge. So many students today can graduate high school without ever truly learning or understanding many of the topics and concepts that teachers try to teach them. With STEM education, students are more accountable for their own learning and are taught better ways to study and learn on their own instead of simply being lectured by their teachers with no real thought coming from the students. This website, http://drpfconsults.com/understanding-the-basics-of-stem-education/, does a great job of breaking down exactly what STEM is all about and it also brings up the important fact that most jobs today are extremely math and science based and how STEM will help prepare students for these types of jobs. We can apply the ideas from Pink’s talk by making the students want to learn for themselves and not just for a grade. This way the students will be working toward a goal that will not take over all of their focus and this will allow them to reach their full potential in school and also later on in their lives.
How might we apply his elements of a new business operating system to STEM education?
We can use this system in our classrooms by lessening the importance of good grades. Students shouldn’t be going to school just to get good grades, they should be in school to learn about things that will help them in their future lives and to help them grow as individuals. With the way schools are now, a majority of students are not getting the most that they can out of
their studies because they are focusing too much on the grades they are getting. If we could shift student focus away from grades and toward fully understanding the material they are learning, I believe we could have much smarter and more prepared students coming out into the real world.
EXPLORE:
How do these principles and practices relate to what you've learned from reading How People Learn?
These principles have built on what I have learned from reading HPL by driving in the importance of knowing your students. I learned in HPL that teachers need to know exactly how their students think and learn so that they can appropriately teach them. This was backed up by this video because the principles are all about giving students multiple ways of doing activities so that they get the most out of the assignments given. If the teachers don’t know their students and how they learn, then they will not be able to effectively set up lessons where everyone will be able to understand to the best of their ability.
How do these principles and practices resonate with the perspectives on STEM learning (e.g., conceptual change, models & modeling, social cognitive, situated learning)?
These principles and practices act on all of the perspectives of STEM learning and if you think about it, they should.
Each of these principles helps to engage the students and keep them focused by presenting the information in a way that is easiest for the student to understand. By giving them different ways of representation the student can see the information in the format that they prefer and this helps them understand the material better. The different ways of action and expression will also help them to work with the information and material given to them in a way that best suits their learning styles and will allow them to get the most out of their explorations.
How are the guidelines for UDL related to being a STEM learner? How about to being a STEM teacher?
These guidelines are related to being a STEM learner because the student has to want to learn and use the options that
are given to them by their teachers to find which they like best and help them the most. Even though the guidelines are given to the teachers, they still need to passed along to the students so that they can see the best ways for them to learn and get the most out of their education. The guidelines are related to the teachers because they have to be able to know them well enough to use them effectively in their classrooms and to help teach the students the best ways that they can learn and understand.
EXTEND:
The smart graphs are fun ways to get students involved in lessons and are also a great added visual component to help
students see what they are learning. It’s also very useful that the graphs come with lesson plans and student assessment sheets. This is helpful for teachers so they can see how they would use this in their own classrooms and how it would fit into their curriculum. I am really excited to see more and more of these types of resources popping up because they really are helpful for teachers and students. After a little searching on the internet, I also found this site, http://www.modernchalkboard.com/fractions-add-subtract.html, which has many lesson to use with students on a SMART board that can be used in this same way to capture students’ attention and allow them to interact more with the lessons. It is very time consuming and difficult to create these types of lessons so it great that those that are being created are also being shared so other teachers can use them in their classrooms.
Readings
In chapter 7 of MTV the author mentions a book by Robert L. Fried called The Game of School. In this book, Fried shows how many students are not going to school to learn but are going to school to get through it with cheap memorization tricks and little real thinking. This is very true in our society today and I even talked a little about this at the beginning of this blog when I commented on Daniel Pink’s talk. As a future teacher, it is important to realize that many students have this mind set when they come into class and my goal is to change their ideas of school toward actual understanding of material and concepts. This chapter explains how to do this by telling in detail the forces that shape the culture of thinking. While there are eight forces, I found two to be extra important. The first is modeling and I found this interesting because it doesn’t mean modeling in the same way that we have been working with it recently. In this section, it talks about the teacher being a good role model and enticing to students to think and work harder by following the teacher’s example. I took many history classes where you could tell that the teacher was not passionate about the material they were teaching and this led the students to also not care about what we were learning. This changed, however, in 11th grade when I took AP U.S. history and my teacher was extremely
charismatic and excited about every topic we discussed. He taught his lessons so that they captured our attention and kept it until the end. He also made us think deeply about events in history and allowed us to discuss why we thought these events happened and how we would have dealt with them if we were there. The amount of history that I learned just in this class was
almost triple what I had learned in all my other history classes combined and this is why modeling is so important for students. The other force that is important is routines. The other chapters this week showed tons of thinking routines for teachers to use with their students and these routines are very useful in the classroom. These routines show the students exactly what types of thinking are required of them and constantly pushes them to their highest level of thinking. A crucial part of using these routines is making sure that you continue to use them often. These routines are great for building students independent thinking and should be used for an extended time because, otherwise, if they are only brought up once in the classroom, the students never get the chance to see the importance of them or remember how to use them.