The State of STEM in 2024

Kevin Hogan OK. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Innovations and Education, the E School News podcast that explores the latest and greatest in Ed Tech every month. In this episode, we dive into one of the most popular yet many times misunderstood acronyms in the world of education. Good old stem. Everyone has heard about it. Lots of people like to advocate for it, but what does it actually mean in the operations of a day-to-day classroom? I asked this question to Patrick Brown. He's the executive director of STEM and Career technical Education in Saint Charles County, Missouri. He oversees the stem and technical programs for approximately 18,000 students. His role involves developing integrated STEM courses, emphasizing critical thinking and real world problem solving. Now all that sounds great, but what does that actually mean? Have a listen. Let's dive right into it. Maybe you can give our audience a little bit of an introduction to yourself and to your district. Patrick Brown Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Pat Brown. I'm executive director of STEM and career and technical education for a large school district in Saint Charles County, Missouri. We're actually a a pretty big district for for our state. I think we're the 7th or 8th largest district in in the state at around 18,000 students. So my primarily role at this point is to develop a stem related courses and programs and also career and technical education. Related courses and programs which I I see really sort of complementing stem. In addition to that I'm very active in the scholarship in STEM and also in science education. Some the author of the best selling book series, instructional sequence Matters is published by NSA. OK. I've written quite a bit about also just ways to promote and engage and activate students, ideas and their learning, so I'm also selling author of activating student ideas in elementary science, also published by NSA. So yeah, absolutely thrilled to talk with you today. Kevin Hogan Yeah. What are you doing your in your spare time? Kevin Hogan You have a lot of stuff going. No. Patrick Brown Yeah, I've got two young kids that keep me busy, very active in sports, and I'm an avid runner and yeah, but I just absolutely love sort of exploring learners and learning and creating environments that really tap into the assets that all kids bring to us. Kevin Hogan As I mentioned before, we started recording, you know, the education space, love their acronyms, right? And there's there's one acronym that almost before the the the two letter AI came about. I would say that stem may have been the most popular of those acronyms going back many years. But if you go to. Speaker Oh yeah. Patrick Brown Do a. Kevin Hogan At Tech conference or you go to a session online and you hear people talk about it and you know many times I'll nod sagely talking about stem and issues surrounding stem. But it can mean many different things to to many different people. Maybe we can. Start off from from your point of view on how you. Would say defined stem give us your three sentences on what stem is. If you can do it. Patrick Brown You know, I'm glad that you brought this up because there's few educational acronyms that are almost common vernacular and stem is one of them. I mean you you bring up the term stem in just everyday conversations. Folks know what it is. Because I, you know, it's very hard to define, so I I instead of a definition I like to think about it in attributes. So one of the attributes, it definitely includes the four domains that are included in the acronym. So science, technology, engineering and math. But I think the critical piece is that. It's the. It's the integration of those four domains. It's not those things separately for something to really be a a stem sort of topic or a stem learning experience. So that's a piece. Speaker Just. Patrick Brown Of it, I'd say the other attribute and this really came out of why stem even as important it's it's a career attribute. So it's starting to prepare kids for areas that we know are high need high wage and only projected to be even higher wage, high need in the in the future and that career. Component is not just sort of a need component in terms of just fulfilling jobs, but the need to prepare kids in different ways than we've ever prepared them before. And that really ties into the third component. The third component really emphasizes that stem. It's more than a body of knowledge, sort of. We've elevated the importance of of using practices that are valued in each of those four domains. And we've also elevated the importance of critical thinking. And it's really learning about topics, issues or problems through the lenses of whatever content is associated with it. The problem solving skills and abilities that are necessary and then the critical thinking that really goes into thinking about data and evidence as sources for us to help individuals make sense. So I said a lot. I didn't give you a three sentence definition, but I think those 3 attributes. Really are really key. Kevin Hogan Yeah, it certainly is a great base to go through this, this discussion, talk a little bit about how you take those concepts and apply them in the day-to-day management of a of a district. And I'll maybe even take you deeper down the rabbit hole into what does that look like. In the classroom, how does that change the way in which a piece of curriculum is being created? Or there's an instructional strategy being implemented with the idea of having stem being part of that? Patrick Brown Absolutely. So the other thing that's super popular right now is talking about teaching to promote student sense making. And the reason I bring this up is because approaching instruction from a sense making perspective, it completely aligns with what we want to achieve in stem. So I want to kind of give you some key elements of teaching for sense making and then show how that kind of connects to stem. So in, in a sense making. Classroom, we're really starting off instruction by activating kids ideas. And we do this in two ways. We ask them about their thoughts, their experiences, and then we situate that around problems that might exist in their region or maybe even bigger, like a global problem. Or we situate it in a phenomena. So phenomena based teaching is is huge in science education. So maybe we situated around a phenomena and those two things really activated kids at kids thinking. So if we ask them about their thoughts or ideas around a specific problem. Issue or a phenomena we've sort of lit in the fuse in their mind because we've created that need. Know situation. And so the second key element is. We want to give kids opportunities. Make evidence based claims and this piece is key, so they need hands on minds on experiences. It doesn't necessarily have to be an experiment or a demo, although kids absolutely love those, but it could be looking at large data sets, especially for high school age kids to start to extract some. Evidence that they're gleaning from that data. The third key piece is we need to find ways to enhance kids understanding. And what I mean by that, it's really twofold. So sometimes and this is really true in the sciences and engineering, there is academic terms, but they're just terms. But if we can introduce those important ideas in light of students, first-hand experiences formulating claims, it gives them sort of that. Academic vocabulary that they need and also allows them to summarize big ideas using sort of the appropriate vocabulary. And the last piece is also critical. It's it's metacognition and metacognition gets gets a lot of attention, but the way I think about it is kids thinking about what works and what doesn't work for their learning because a key piece of of stem is creating more self-sufficient learners, more kids that can problem. Of and if we can be purposeful and intentional during our instructional practices about kids thinking about what's working, what's not working, we better give them the tools to be problem solvers in the future. I like to keep things simple. I boil it down to those four elements, activating kids ideas, having them form evidence based claims, enhancing their learning, and then promoting metacognition. And then I approach it through what I like to call and explore before explain format. And that's very much teaching those four elements in that order. So we want to give kids first hand experiences doing explorations before we introduce academic vocabulary and I think this will make sense for for most folks academic vocabulary. If there's no framework to incorporate it, it doesn't stick. Approaching those four key elements in that order. That I described, it's really critical. Yeah, critically important. Kevin Hogan It seems you know a lot of this responsibility. Obviously, as most everything does in in the classroom, fall upon the responsibility of the educator themselves or the faculty themselves, right? And it seems a lot of the ideas that you that you're expressing here would be dependent on each individual educator as. Speaker Yeah. Kevin Hogan As you go along. Is there a way to standardize this? I mean because you have different. Types and different personalities of educators. Some might be naturally inclined to this sort of work in this way. Others maybe not so much, or maybe a lot of you know, this is the way I've always done it, and this is the way I always will. A lot of that kind of all fell apart during COVID, and we've all had to establish new strategies. Patrick Brown Yeah. Yeah. Kevin Hogan But Even so, it seems that it would kind of be dependent upon the educator talk a little bit about how you can see the standardized across the school or even more so across the. Speaker District. Patrick Brown Oh, absolutely. I've had a tremendous amount of success with this, so I'm going to kind of explain the process that I use. And I also feel like I I need to say that educators are the remarkable creative individuals and the more we can tap into their creativity and their expertise, the better. So I use this saying, you know, we're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. And what I mean by that is, so many folks, especially in in the science area, are already doing hands on explorations. We're going to really focus on what teachers are already doing and then sort of work out from there. So really considering like the tried and true hands on stuff you're already dealing. And then working towards those other elements from that starting point, because that's really the key destination. If we can get kids to make an evidence based claim, then we've created a situation where the kids are doing the hard intellectual work. Because there's only one way for a kid to make an evidence based claim, they've got to be able to say something about content based on their experiences with data. And the only way they can say something about that data is if they've done some critical thinking. So when I work with teachers and I can kind of paint the picture, we really start with all the hands on they're doing and then we focus in on one hands on to think about a lesson. And and we work out from that. So we'll think about, OK, so they're doing this great hands on experiment. How could we activate kids ideas about that hands on experience do we want to use a problem. One of the hallmarks of engineering is really the purpose of engineering is to solve problems or or do we really want to explore. Question which is more what the purpose of science? And then if we want to explore a question or a problem, what sort of phenomena can we use? We sort of worked the same way on the back end, so once we figured out, you know, the explorations kids can have that allow them to form evidence based claims, we think about what teacher enhancements are necessary to sophisticate kids understanding and where I always tell my folks to go is go to your standards, they're going to tell you the key. Ideas and key terms to make kids more scientifically literate. Through it. And then the last piece is really throughout this whole thing, how can we promote students thinking about their developing understanding? It sounds simple, but a lot of times it's just asking kids, what did you think at the beginning? What do you think now and what sort of things facilitated your development of ideas? Kevin Hogan Yes. Patrick Brown So I've really simplified the process, but I like to think most folks got into science or stem teaching because they like hands on. Let's start with the good things folks are already doing and then sort of flesh out those other key elements based on those, those hands on type things that really are what most of us get into teaching. More. Kevin Hogan Yeah. Interesting. Listening to your insights here, and I mentioned the other acronym AI, it seems like a lot of these strategies might be effective against what some of the. Controversy surrounding AI's and the use of students using it to, say, plagiarize or cheat, or this or that. The things that you're encouraging in terms of getting students to to come up with their own ideas that come through is almost kind of a a solution against AI, right? Patrick Brown Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But you know, I the way I view AI and I'm glad you brought this up. It's a tool. So I was thinking about this, you know, even this morning it's similar to, like a microscopes, a tool if you don't know how to finely focus or coarse, coarsely focus a microscope. Regardless of that slide you put under there. You're. You're not going to be able to see things and in terms of AI, you've got to know the question to ask. And you as a student, you've got to know what are the implications of what that AI is spitting out for the task that you're trying to trying to solve. So when I think of AI, I I think of it. As a tool. And as the tool that you know, the students, they need to be able to articulate the question that they're really looking for and then to be able to analyze what the AI is, is generating for them. I don't know. We probably could get into debate whether AI is smart or not, but I mean, if we just look at what AI is doing, it's pulling data. It's triangulating the data and. It's. Putting on an assertion based on the triangulation of data, but it's not asking the question and it's not deciding what are the. Kevin Hogan Right. Patrick Brown Implications of the evidence that comes out so. Kevin Hogan Right. So it's just another tool in, in, in the tool. Blocks that actually encourages these stem strategies. Now let me ask you this. You know, for our readers and our listeners who are not as far along the path they might be hearing from the school board that they need more stem, whatever that is. There's an encouragement of kind of developing stem strategies. Patrick Brown Yeah. Kevin Hogan Within their schools, what would be some first steps for? Them to take. Patrick Brown Well, you know, I mentioned the the sort of the four attributes and I I really think those are those are key and it's more than just like me promoting it those those four things are heavily they're supported by huge bodies of scholarship. So not single studies like cognitive science supports it neurobiological science. Supports it. Science, education, math education supports it. So I mean those those attributes are heavily grounded in the rest. Search and I like to tell folks that sort of understand the research on learners and learning use that when you go to evaluate curriculum that you're going to develop or purchase, or if you're going to create more of a homegrown curriculum. So I wanted to bring this up because there are so many curriculum providers that say they're stem. But if you're a, you're a teacher or maybe a coordinator, you've got to have those. Look for us to see. Really. Is it going to promote the type of learning that we need of our students for a 21st century? Or is it just sort of throwing that that term that's so popular on a curriculum, hoping somebody will will purchase it? I do quite a bit of this work with even people that are developing curriculum or looking to purchase curriculum. And I say, you know, at a minimum it boils down to these these elements like. Is it activating kids ideas around problems? Do kids have opportunities to make the evidence based claim? Are there enhancements that take it a? Little bit further. So that's what I'd really advocate for. And on the school board side, really being able to articulate to the school board when you take either curriculum that's developed by teachers or a commercially developed one. That it really. Illustrates those key things that we know about learners and learning. Kevin Hogan So you really just need to get under the under the hood of these of these products and services and see that they apply to these pillars that that. Mentioned that. Patrick Brown Yeah, but it's amazing. Professional learning for teachers to instead of going on into a curriculum blind to have look fors and they really get a deeper sense of, is this a good curriculum that's going to take my kids to where they need or is it just a stamp in the label stem on it with some key missing things? Kevin Hogan Now. To go back to your particular journey in terms of implementing these things within your district and you look out on the horizon, what is kind of on the the top of your your list of of things to do going forward? Sure. Patrick Brown Oh gosh, you know what? One of the hardest things about being a STEM teacher is it's being ready to evolve and pivot. I think that's a key piece of it. So if you're a teacher that likes to teach the same thing year after year, you're going to really struggle with this because it's always changing based on regional and global needs. I think for me personally, I I want to start to make better connections with some between some of the regional issues that we face and approach some of the things that we've taught in very traditional ways, that sort of pivot and have more of a regional focus to it. So our standards are set. But how we teach those standards is up to us. So things that we've taught and maybe science in a very traditional way, or math in a very traditional way, we could use a regional problem that we're facing as the context for teaching those standards. That's already in our curriculum. And that's going to take some work. It's going to take some some learning on teachers, behalves and administrators behaves about things that they haven't traditionally used as sort of the focus for a lesson. But I'm excited about it because really, if we go back to one of the. The big big purpose is a stem, and that's to look at problems and phenomena that we face either regionally or globally. I feel like that's more true to it than teaching teaching a science or math or a technology computer science topic, sort of in isolation of those regional or global issues. Kevin Hogan Mm-hmm. I would on the the assessment side of things, I mean these are certainly new techniques and strategies. I assume it can't be a a traditional assessment technique. On the other side. Patrick Brown Yeah, I think performance based is the route to go. So really looking at what is the student producing and then how are they supporting those stem related claims, what data as evidenced are they using? It's not that it can't be done through a multiple choice type question, but we really want to get at. How is the students thinking evolved and how are they sort of supporting their ideas with data that serves as evidence? Kevin Hogan Yes. Patrick Brown And I I realize that it takes more time and nobody has enough time. But if you think about the work we all do, it's really more in line with performance based authentic tasks where we have to put an idea out there and support it with data that serves as evidence, then more rote type things that. You typically find in and easy to assess type items. Kevin Hogan Right. How about the the 5th letter, the occasional 5th letter? I find that with you, if you're adding the A into stem to turn it into steam, is that something that you that you have indulgent? Patrick Brown Yes and no. So I I mean certainly in the arts they go through many of the same problem solving type processes that engineers, scientists, mathematicians and definitely in in computer science and technology. I guess my caution is anytime you add something else to. Something that already exists. I I worry that you're going to lose something. So you, you know, adding art, I I don't see an issue with it because certainly those skills that you're using in, in both the fine and the performing arts, they totally align with the types of skills and knowledge you want kids to develop and engineering, math and all the other stem related areas. I just think if you just if a district decides to go that route, then they really need to be purposeful and intentional. When they do, do it to show that, hey, these. Things are all connected. Because if you just have art out here and you have steam but you're not showing the connection, then I'd say, well, you're not really doing the steam that is needed to promote the higher levels of learning. Kevin Hogan Especially if you've already had maybe some sort of established strategy going in and then you're just kind of trying to to wrench something in. On top of it, right? Patrick Brown Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, it's up to the the district and the leaders to decide. Are we steam, are we stem, are we something even bigger. But then the purposeful and intentional sort of special combination of those things need to be there. If you're really sort of. Living up to that acronym that you choose. Kevin Hogan Yeah. And now you mentioned that that this is a never ending process. It's not something that you established and that that is static. How do you kind of stay abreast of the changes yourself? I mean, do you have any recommendations for our audience to in terms of resources that are out there, other sort of online communities or professional learning opportunities? To kind of keep themselves abreast on the on the state of. Then. Patrick Brown Yeah, I think definitely looking at your regional trends is a good place. And just because I pick up maybe an issue in my region doesn't mean it's going to be an issue in another region, either in, in the state of Missouri or even in the country. So being attuned to those, I think there's some we are lucky in that there's some. Very well developed curricular materials that really do do the justice that STEM is advocating for. So I would be also really just sort of, you know, intentional about those curriculum related purposes and seeing that I guess I can say this. I mean I just gave a a really popular talk called can stem save the world and the examples I did were just I, you know I shared probably 20 to 25. Newspaper clippings of all the the severe weather we experienced last summer and the heat. So even those become topics and that was something we faced across the US and even globally. Just really hot temperatures for a long time that we hadn't experienced before. Kevin Hogan Well, doctor, your insights have been really valuable. I think you know, again, it's this when you talk about stem, it's this ethereal subject and you're really able to kind of make it more precise and and concise for our readers and our listeners to kind of take next steps with it. So I appreciate your time and I appreciate your insights and and good luck. Look forward with your. District. Patrick Brown Yeah, you bet. Kevin. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Love talking about stem. Thank you. Kevin Hogan And that's all we have for this month's episode of Innovations in Education. Be sure to go up to eschoolnews.com and add your name to the subscription list if you want to get this podcast every month. If you're not already doing so, be sure to go into our webinars where we have other conversations such as this talking about some of the top and most important. Issues that you need to learn for the way that you operate your school districts. So thanks again for listening and have a great day.