For a few years, the concept of Cohort 21 has intrigued me. Meeting with colleagues from different schools who are passionate about implementing cutting-edge educational practices to provide a more meaningful experience for the students is exciting. A room full of educators ready to help each other improve their practices is what I like about this profession as we all look to continually grow and be the best version of ourselves for the benefit of our respective school communities. I liked the way this session got us to focus on what we think is important and urgent which kept bringing me back to a passion of mine as a teacher – making learning more applicable for students in the world beyond our classroom.
As our world continues to evolve, we need to prepare our students for that which requires skills beyond theory teaching and testing. Executive functioning skills, empathy, and cross-curricular approaches to problem-solving in a hands-on environment through prototyping and Design Thinking practices. My “important” goal for these sessions is to figure out a way to incorporate STEAM into the class curriculum rather than it being its own entity school-wide and utilize my expertise and passion to help teachers and students get the most out of their experience. To do this properly, I will be looking at how other STEAM coordinators have evolved this role in their school over a longer period of time and what they have found to be best practices.
Looking at the Season 11 Strands, Supporting the Pedagogy, Belonging, and Well-Being of students from JK-8 seems to be speaking to me. Through dynamic problem-solving of real-world situations and the incorporation of STEAM practices into curriculum design, a diverse range of students can find meaning and improve their engagement with the curriculum content as their strengths can be utilized in many ways. This practice also provides them with the learning of future-ready skills and the resilience to keep trying. As our students tend to see subjects as isolated blocks of material, my goal is to help them realize content is connected. These connections lead to a richer and deeper understanding of the world around them.
Moving forward a couple of challenges I see are; 1. the design and implementation of new assessment tools to reflect a changing educational paradigm, 2. getting the buy-in of parents to these new assessment tools, and 3. being able to optimize our schedule so that I can work on developing this program to the depths that it could be taken. Hopefully, as we progress through Cohort 21, I am able to discuss these questions with fellow STEAM experts to gain new perspectives and novel ideas to help implement these practices in the best possible way at RDS.
So glad you joined Cohort 21! Looking forward to your posts.
Hi Scott, you and I are going to have so much to talk about this Saturday! You and I seem to be on a similar path in our How Might We questions, and I would love to share some of what I have found. I think it’s important that you have already considered multiple factors such as parent buy-in and ways to fully incorporate STEAM as it can often feel like a trendy buzzword instead of an important concept that permeates across the board.
I’m excited to see where you go with this! If you would like other resources, please try to connect with @rporteous and @egelleny as they are both fantastic resources and educators!
Hi Scott, your post reminds me of @smartini ‘s. You both talked about how challenging it is to be a Specialist teacher in a subject area that is transdisciplinary.
As a technology integrator and design/STEAM teacher, I find the tension between wanting to shift pedagogical approaches within the school and finding the time within timetables to work with all stakeholders a challenge at all schools.
I hope that we will be able to connect since one of my goals is to influence and inspire others to teach coding/ computational thinking and design thinking in their classes so that educators can facilitate learning with technology to support student achievement.