For our second Face to Face, we focused on the “How might we” part of our action plan. Trying to come up with this question was a challenge for me as, for anyone who knows how my thought process works, I had to go through a lot of rewording and a lot of technicalities in my head, and still couldn’t find peace and settle on a question. With the help of the great facilitators and coaches , I finally settled on “How might we develop a framework that values the journey of learning over grades”? Or so I thought…
After I came back to RDS, I had a couple of conversations with our Junior School Coordinator, Assistant Head of School, and Head of School to help bounce ideas and let them know where I had settled. The ideas kept flowing and I wanted to develop a scope and sequence for how STEAM could be incorporated in a more transdisciplinary fashion with a process to document the learning of students in hopes to build resilience, future competencies, and passion for learning. The students enjoy building and completing hands-on tasks but incorporating theory into their design challenges and connecting it to more subjects is the next stage of evolution in our product. To develop this, I discussed creating comprehensive engineering journals that include reflections at important stages and potential user interviews depending on the product and age group. I also discussed creating a STEAM calendar that would have my schedule in it to allow teachers to “book time” with me to help enrich their classes rather than having it as its own entity. During the time that STEAM classes would have occurred, my goal is to create grade and subject specific lessons to incorporate STEAM into curriculum content for all teachers to access.
I am hoping with some of these new ideas, and the more that I will get from future Face-to-Faces, I can come up with a way to create more engaging lessons and ways to get students to enjoy the process of learning and the journey.