Effecting Change

My courses at Walden have opened my eyes to the importance of STEM education. Each class I’ve taken has provided me with more insight as to how to change my lessons to include more inquiry and teach my students how to rely more on their own knowledge and less on me as they attempt to discover answers for themselves.

Most of the teachers I work with are unfamiliar with the term STEM education. As a leader in my school I take it as my responsibility to take what I have learned here and pass it along to my colleagues. I hope that I can effect change, not just in my own department, but school-wide. I think all teachers would be shocked to learn that U.S. students are falling behind students in places like China and India and this will motivate them to change their curriculum in order to better prepare our students to be globally competitive.

One of the obstacles I have found, as I’ve tried to change my lessons over the past 18 months, is some resistance to old ways of thinking. I work with other teachers who have been teaching for many years and are comfortable keeping their lessons the same year after year. When I’ve approached some of the teachers in my own department about updating our lessons to include more STEM based activities, they have not seemed interested in taking the time to make the often time consuming revisions that are necessary. The best way I’ve found to overcome this resistance is to make significant revisions to at least one lesson per unit of study and implement it myself, reflect on how it went and make any necessary changes to the lesson. I can then approach other teachers and explain the changes I made and ask for input as to how we can improve it even further. This seems to have worked on most occasions and they are becoming more open to making revisions. Next year I will continue to do the same until I feel that most, if not all, of my lessons meet the criteria of true scientific inquiry. When teaching a new lesson, or a revised lesson, I will often tell my students that it is new and ask for their feedback too. I find that many students like to be challenged and appreciate being asked for feedback.

Where's Our Sputnik?

Thomas Friedman’s article brings to light many of the challenges our nation is facing today in terms of the direction we are heading and the roadmap we are laying out for our children. What will the U.S. look like in another 20 years? Will we be even farther behind nations like China or will we find a way to get excited and motivate our citizens to continue to be the nation that produced such ingenious idea as the Internet?

When the space race began and we saw the launch of Sputnik, we responded by investing in science and math education and produced more students studying math and science than anywhere else. What has happened to this push? Where is our Sputnik? What needs to be done to get our nation excited again about these fields? Do we need to be surpassed by other nations before we really get motivated? Will it be too late by then?

Friedman brought up many valid points about where a lot of wasted money is going. I’m not naïve enough to think we can just pull all of our troops out of the Middle East and the war on terror will end. But when I think about all the money that is going overseas and I look, from the inside, where we are falling short in education, I feel very frustrated and helpless. In my personal opinion, I would love to see our troops come home and focus more money on defending our boarders here and finding ways to become less dependent on foreign oil. If we spent that money on better educating our citizens, especially in STEM education, I feel strongly that we have people right here in this country that can solve these problems if they are given the opportunity to study and thrive in these fields.