LEXINGTON, Ky.— Fayette County school district is raising the bar for what science, technology, engineering and mathematics education can look like in public schools. STEM programs in public schools are traditionally treated as optional, but now most educators agree that STEM needs to be integrated into the regular curriculum.
“For STEAM [science, technology, education, engineering, art and mathematics] my focus is different than just making sure kids are hitting and learning different standards,” said Jennifer Rodabaugh, a STEAM teacher at Picadome Elementary School. “My focus is all application. Showing the kids not only why you need to know the parts of a story, but how that would apply to a real-life problem. Why you need to know how to measure an ad and how you would actually apply that to a real-world problem. Everything that I do is under the basis of, how can they take this skill and apply it, not just show me that they can do it, but actually use it in a scenario.”
Fayette County Public Schools are currently undertaking several endeavors to utilize STEM education as more than just a special program. This fall, Fayette County opened a brand-new all-girls school focused on STEM education. Rise STEM Academy for Girls is one of few public elementary schools in the country that is dedicated to all-girl STEM education.
“The goal is to make sure that we’re going away from the ‘okay it’s time for math, open your book, close your book, boom. Now it’s time for reading, open and close your book.’ We do what’s more called explorations,” said Jennifer Jacobs, the principal of Rise STEM Academy for Girls. “For example, our second-grade scholars have done a lot in regard to the natural environment and talking about recycling. They have started to bar graph the amounts of recycling that is taken out on a daily basis, so there’s the math component, and then also seeing the effects that are outside of the classroom realm, which is getting to influence their families to recycle more, and their neighborhood, and being more conscious about what they throw in the trash versus what they throw in the recycling.”
In 2018 the district also received a grant from the Kloiber foundation which funded the creation of a STEM bus with the purpose of providing STEM education to third graders at 37 different elementary schools. The STEM Bus is a converted school bus equipped with flexible work stations able to accommodate a multitude of lab projects.
“When we take this out to a school we usually have half of a classroom in at a time and they usually rotate through four different stations,” said Ashley Faulkner, one of the two district STEM learning coaches in charge of running the STEM Bus. “We’re bringing this new technology out to schools that don’t most likely have these types of materials and kids don’t have exposure to that kind of thing. We really wanna get it out there, but we also want them to understand that stem is not just cool toys and robots, it’s also low-tech stuff, so we’ll always have one station that uses common everyday materials to have them build something to solve a problem.”
Due to the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic this year, the STEM Bus is currently unable to travel to schools. However, this has not stopped district instructors Faulkner and Josh Rayburn, who direct the program, from continuing to work towards changing the face of STEM education, as they are currently creating a STEM curriculum for teachers to be rolled out in January 2021.
“Ashley and I are now spending time developing lessons and units that teachers can use,” Rayburn said. “I think that’s gonna have a bigger impact than our bus is going to because more students and more teachers can use our units that we’re developing for their classrooms as an enrichment side … One of the biggest things on the bus is to see the kids say, ‘I didn’t know I could do that’ or a teacher says, ‘I’ve never seen that kid do what they just did.’ That’s what we’re trying to show, it doesn’t have to be a fancy field trip bus that comes to your school, STEM is something that you can do every single day in your classroom.”
The integration of project-based STEM learning into the regular classroom setting allows educators to go beyond traditional models and provide a more hands-on learning experience. More than simply making learning more interesting for students, STEM education also creates a strong foundation to prepare scholars to solve modern issues in the future.
“When you think about careers now, careers have changed and evolved so much,” Faulkner said. “Our education should be doing that as well. It seems as if, in a lot of scenarios, education is slow to catch up with the careers. STEM is really that gateway to making sure that we are preparing kids … for things that don’t even exist yet.”
STEM projects cover an array of topics including polygons and programming, fossils, and forces and motion. These lessons incorporate all sorts of materials from drones to robots to virtual reality goggles. On the STEM Bus, students experience simulations of real-world problems such as designing a roof to withstand natural disasters, building robots that test to see if a building can survive an earthquake, and programming drones to deliver blood from a blood bank to a hospital during a crisis.
Still, educators emphasize that STEM education is more than just high-tech gadgets. The Rise Academy is demonstrating this by utilizing their outdoor space for environmental sciences. They plan to develop a community garden, a water irrigation system, and acquire solar panels in order to extend the classroom to the natural environment.
“We would really like to see a shift in mindset from STEM being this isolated, special class, into being more of a lens for learning to where we can approach every subject area, every problem with a STEM lens on,” Faulkner said.
In the past, curriculum standards made it extremely difficult for schools to maintain STEM programs because engineering principles were not part of the science requirements. Without having those standards, many schools were unable to justify the inclusion of STEM in a campus budget.
“We’re not like art or music or P.E.,” Rodabaugh said. “Those things are required, they have their own curriculum set up and running. Those are things you have to plan and fund for … A STEAM lab is usually the first thing that gets cut.”
Budgetary restraints are just one of the barriers preventing the rapid integration of STEM education in public schools. For teachers, simply finding the time and the educational resources to implement STEM concepts into the general classroom is a difficult task.
“Right before I came into the lab I was a first-grade teacher,” Rodabaugh said. “I knew there were other things I could be doing with my students besides having them fill out worksheets or write book reports, and I was so busy in the classroom I just didn’t have time to learn these new things.”
The purpose of creating the STEM Bus, Rise Academy, and a new STEM curriculum for teachers is to combat these challenges, and ultimately take strides towards changing the face of STEM education permanently.
More information about the STEM Bus can be found on the STEM Bus website.
For more information about the Rise STEM Academy for Girls go to https://www.fcps.net/Page/16148.
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