There are many reasons for this, and I outlined some of them in a series of blogs last year in which I elaborated on ten reasons to teach STEM. It’s engaging, it promotes cooperative learning, critical thinking, and differentiated instruction. But these pale in comparison to the real reason that this must be more than a temporary swing of the pendulum.
Our society has changed, and the educational model that serves it must keep pace or we will fall further behind. Long ago, public education was designed to instill content mastery into the minds of students. The more content you could learn, the more marketable you were when you sought a career. Content mastery is no longer the primary task of education. Due to the acceleration of technology, content is fluid and grows exponentially. Even if I could teach my middle school students all the current educational content, it would do no more than ensure that they were dinosaurs when they exit high school. While content still has a value, today’s students must be taught how to learn over what to learn.
Today’s employers value cooperative skills, creativity, and problem solving over mastery of content. STEM and PBL assure students develop these skills.
Today’s jobs don’t look like the ones of the past either. As recently as my own childhood, middle class America was largely connected to the manufacturing sector. If one parent had a job at a mill or plant, the family could live comfortably on that wage. Manufacturing employed a large swath of the workforce who had moved beyond entry level work yet didn’t hold a professional degree.
Today however, many of the manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. This has left us with a dichotomized employment world comprised of low-paying and high-paying jobs with an empty midsection. As fewer and fewer people find work in manufacturing, they are forced into entry-level employment if they don’t hold a professional degree. If this doesn’t change, tomorrow’s workers who lack a professional degree will be forced into low-paying service industry positions. This requires both parents in a home to find employment in order to cling to the middle income band.
This doesn’t mean that every student must attend college. In fact, many STEM-based careers require technical and vocational education. STEM careers are the fastest-growing segment of the job market; they will take the place of the shrinking manufacturing sector that served middle class America. In fact, they will more than offset this because STEM careers offer pay in line with professional degrees. And these lucrative jobs already exist for our students.
If America does not prepare its workers for the opportunity to enter STEM fields, we must look elsewhere, for these jobs will be filled. The question is, will our students be at the back of the line, or the front?

I’m conducting a bold experiment. Six weeks ago I started teaching a new elective for our third trimester. Even though Mistletoe Elementary is a STEM school, I have more ideas than time, so I offered to teach an elective simply called “STEM”. On the first day, two dozen 6th through 8th grade students arrived, and the first one in the door asked, “How are you going to grade this class?” I answered honestly, “I don’t know; I haven’t thought about it.” Now a month and a half later, I have not issued any ​grades, yet the students rush to class each day, work from the moment they arrive, complain when they have to stop and clean up, and I have had zero students off task and no behavior problems.

The students began the first day wiring circuits using Play Dough. They were challenged to create a circuit to light up four LEDs. After some thinking and trial and error, they learned to make a series of Play Dough balls and connect them with the LED lights. By connecting battery terminals to the first and last ball of Play Dough, all of them lit up. “However,” I showed them, “If I remove one light, they all go out.” I explained that this is how old strings of Christmas lights performed. “How can you design a circuit so that if one light goes out, the rest stay lit?”
They struggled with the task for a couple of days, but eventually a student rolled his Play Dough into two parallel snakes instead of balls. By jumping the LEDs from one snake to the other and connecting the snake’s ends to the battery, they had discovered the difference between wiring in series and in parallel.
Next we learned to drive Spheros, the programmable balls popularized in the Star Wars movie. After learning how to control them, the students designed covers for them out of tag board. A balloon was attached to the back and a straight pin to the front. Then they battled each other in an octagon made of meter sticks.
In our most recent build, students studied the principles of hydraulics. Then they used popsicle sticks, syringes, and tubing to construct battling arms. Their goal was to knock their opponent off the table.
No behavior problems, no off-task behavior. Just hard-working students engaged in the fun of learning. All without grades. How is this possible, don’t students need the motivation of grades to learn?
I’m not certain of the answers to these questions, and I think more formal research is needed, but I have some ideas based on my observations. First of all, I had to ask myself why we grade in the first place. Obviously we are trying to document and quantify learning. But I suspect that we already know who is learning in our classes and who is not.
When we give an assessment, we typically can guess who will do well and who will struggle. We also know of students in our class who bright and are learning but do not necessarily have grades that reflect that. So grading is often done after the fact in a sense as it reinforces what we already knew. Any teacher already has their hand on the pulse of the class anyway.
Sometimes we use grades as a motivation. Students who value their grades will stirve to get the A and learn in the process. I was that sort of student. It did not occur to me that the purpose of learning was to grow and satisfy our insatiable brains. For me, learning occurred as a byproduct of my pursuit of good grades.
But here was an entire class that was working and learning without grade motivation. Some of the students in my elective were also in my math/science class and were very grade motivated. This leads me to suspect that when learning is presented in a brain-palatable format, the external motivation of grading is not necessary. In fact, some of the students who I knew were learning the most were getting Fs in their other classes due to a lack of work.
This makes me suspect that perhaps the educational process has become synthetic. By that I mean that the way we help brains grow and learn does not fit its natural design. Think about it; we teach reading through engaging books, not by studying the dictionary. Yet math and science are often studied via text-based approaches instead of by engaging applications, causing many students to ask the question they do not ask in other content areas: “When are we ever going to use this?” That’s a question that is never asked in PE class. To this day, I remember the excitement of learning to do a back flip on a trampoline in high school even though I have never needed to do a back flip during a job interview.
This experiment has left me asking myself, “How can I engage my students’ brains more effectively?” As our school ends its third year as a STEM center, I believe I’m inching toward the answer.
Happy teaching,
Brad

We separated our students by gender for a day. The boys were in my homeroom, and the girls were in hers. The resulting conversations were revealing, but there was something even deeper that I noticed.
The boys said, “The guy substitutes get us. When we are off task or goofing off, they come up to us and joke with us. We all laugh and then we get back to work.”
“The girls don’t get in trouble for talking when we have a lady sub,” they added.
Though I didn’t agree with everything they said, and I certainly didn’t agree with their disrespect and defiance in the presence of a female substitute, I listened to their opinions. I explained, “Of course a male sub will understand you better than a female, but that doesn’t justify rudeness.”
I also noticed that when the boys talked that day, they were generally loud, but during a discussion, usually only one talked at a time. When the girls arrived, they spoke more quietly, but they were also more likely to talk at the same time. They seemed to have no problem with this, but it was easier for me to hear the loud single voices of the boys than the quieter mixture of the girls’ voices.
The girls were much better at working cooperatively and staying focused on a task. The boys immediately set up a leadership hierarchy that was more competitive when they worked in boys-only groups. More boys chose to work independently. Yet both classes got their work done with equal proficiency.
I wondered if we may have created a female-friendly learning environment in our schools.
We want students to work in cooperative groups and hold fair, orderly discussions.
Cory Turner of NPR wrote an article about a study at Yale recently (http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/09/28/495488716/bias-isnt-just-a-police-problem-its-a-preschool-problem) that showed that teachers can tend to look for disruptive behavior in boys, especially black boys. In the study, 135 preschool and kindergarten teachers watched a series of videos and were told to try to spot disruptive behavior before it happened. In each video was a white boy, a black boy, a white girl, and a black girl. In none of the videos were there any actual incidences of bad behavior. As they watched, scanning software tracked the eye movements of the teachers.  What they found was that teachers looked at boys more than girls, and at black children more than white in searching for challenging behavior.
Ouch!
I must admit that even as a male teacher, I am probably guilty of the gender bias myself. When the students were mixed into their regular homerooms the next day, I noticed the boys’ voices dominated the class noise. There were just as many girls talking and off task, but they were quieter. I call the boys on their behavior much more than I do the girls. Part of this may be due to the fact that girls mature in middle school faster than the boys do. The behavior of the girls is usually more in line with common classroom rules, but I don’t want to penalize boys for their physiological development nor subject them to my bias.
At my school, I am the only male teacher. Many of the boys in my classes do not have their father in the home, so it is not until the 8th grade that those boys will see a male leadership figure on a consistent basis. Is it any wonder that the leadership positions in our school’s student government and the honor rolls at the awards assemblies are also predominantly female?
In our schools we are trying to get more girls involved in math, science, and engineering fields that are typically male populated, and that’s a good goal. But I wonder if we are simply displacing the boys and replacing them with girls. Could we have a more inclusive plan?
Since our gender-specific day, I have been more aware of my tendency of singling out the boys. I have tried instead to practice celebrating the difference. When the boys are loud, outspoken, or challenging, I try to laugh it off. I smile at them and let it brush off my shoulder. If it warrants serious discussion, I can do that later one-on-one.
I would love to know your thoughts on this sensitive subject. Drop a comment, and let’s see if we can make our classrooms and schools more inclusive of both genders.

1. ​​STEM has real world application
2. STEM fosters problem-solving skills
3. STEM is hands-on instruction
4. STEM is differentiated instruction
5. STEM promotes cooperative learning
6. STEM teaches creativity
7. STEM makes failure a learning opportunity
8. STEM involves high-level thinking
9. STEM requires students to be actively engaged
10. STEM is the future

Now we come to the final installment in the series: STEM is the future.Often education is the tail of the dog instead of the head. We lag behind the times in technology and in content. Within a year of my high school graduation in 1974, everything I learned to do using pencil and paper mathematics could be done by a $25 pocket calculator.Yet even twenty years later, I was teaching pencil and paper math. No one could earn a livable wage with that expertise (unless they aspired to be a math teacher) yet it persisted in our state standards and in our classrooms until Common Core came along.We are seeing the result of the old approach today. More and more high-paying jobs must be outsourced as graduating students lack the skills of their modern society. These are S.T.E.M. skills. The five top-paying jobs are all in S.T.E.M. related fields:

1. Petroleum Engineering
2. Actuarial Mathematics
3. Nuclear Engineering
4. Chemical Engineering
5. Electronics and Communication Engineering

These fields offer six-digit salaries.
That also means that a S.T.E.M.-based major will allow a person to pay off college loans faster than any other field. With the rising cost of college education and the burdensome ongoing expense of financing that education, a S.T.E.M. major is a logical and practical option.
When we also consider that S.T.E.M.-related jobs are predicted to experience more than a 60% growth in the next ten years, we see that teaching S.T.E.M. is indeed teaching for their future instead of for our past.
And teaching for the future will not even guarantee that students will have everything they need to land in a career. Who foresaw the growth in the field of drone technology ten years ago? Tomorrow’s job seeker will not only need to have a firm grasp on the latest technology, they must be flexible and adaptable to new environments. Problem-based learning promotes this characteristic.
Today I am beginning to see the fruit of this new approach to instruction. When I teach my digital photography elective, when my colleague takes on the task of teaching coding, when I utilize new software and technology in my teaching approach, it is often my students who become the experts and consultants. When someone raises their hand with an issue, I’m often calling upon one of my young experts to solve the problem.I’m no longer the sage with the content knowledge; I’m a director of a project. I keep the team focused on the goal and ensure that they work cooperatively. As often as not, I’m learning with them about a world that lies ahead – aworld they will enter and conquer. In the process, they will leave me far behind, and I’m okay with that because my ultimate goal is to create learners that are independent from me.
And one final note:For me there is an eleventh reason to teach S.T.E.M. curriculum that Wiggins never mentioned. Though I have enough years in the classroom to retire at any time, I am more excited than ever to go to work each day. I cannot imagine how retirement could be any better than what I am doing now. The excitement my students show each day rivals that look on my son’s face when he learned to walk so long ago.Being a part of that process with my students, watching their first tottering steps, seeing their smiles, lifting them back up when they fall, and witnessing their successful steps as they walk away makes this more than a job and even more than a career. I get to be part of a great adventure everyday. I’m planting synapses in adolescent brains, and the harvest is bountiful! 

This is not the way we were designed to learn. When I think back to when my son learned to walk, it was his tottering and his tumbling that helped him to develop a sense of balance. During the early stages he was really bad at it, but failure never deterred him. Each time he lost his balance and fell, he would laugh, get back up, and try again. The process of learning a new and empowering skill was never inhibited by failure.
But somewhere between those early steps and the time my students enter my 8th grade class, something has changed. Failing is no longer seen as a necessary part of the learning process. This is sad, because all of my students and I fail often. Somehow we get the message that to fail in front of others is not okay. We develop the mindset of, “Don’t try unless you can get it right. If you fail, you are a failure.”
But failure is actually how our brains learn. When we perform a task successfully, nothing new occurs in our brain. However, when we make a mistake or error and repair it, a new synapse forms. Thus learning is dependent upon a discrepant event – upon failing to fit something into an old paradigm.
A great illustration of this is the remarkable video by Derek Muller on his YouTube channel, Veritasium. Take a moment to watch the video and notice that no one learned until they were willing to be wrong.
S.T.E.M. instruction fosters this mindset. It moves students away from failure paralysis and risk aversion. When my students fail to solve a problem, they no longer see it as a cliff at the end of a dead-end road. They see it as part of the process. It is an opportunity to learn – to restart from a better position.
In fact, I often model S.T.E.M. instruction using a cyclical model. First you encounter a problem. Then you research what is already known and how others have approached the problem. From there you design a solution. Then you build it, test it, and evaluate the results. This then leads back into the loop. If your solution doesn’t work, you do more and better research, better design, and so on. The student continues in this loop until they are satisfied with their solution.
And this is how my son learned to walk. No tumble ever deterred him from trying again. He cycled through the loop over and over, more excited each time, and eventually he mastered a new skill and built a whole bunch of cool synapses in the process.

In our current series we have been exploring an intriguing article by Sarah Wiggins titled “What is STEM and why should I teach it?” (http://www.morethanaworksheet.com/2015/06/01/what-is-s-t-e-m-and-why-should-i-teach-it/) In this post we will explore her point that S.T.E.M. fosters creativity in students. Wiggins is not alone in this respect. In an article in Edutopia in 2013, Ainissa Ramirez lists creativity as a basic human need along with air, food, and shelter. We know that a S.T.E.M lesson will fall flat if our students lack creativity, but how do we grow that trait?
According to researchers an important component in developing creativity is to allow time to play. However, in our current educational model, we are seeing more and more schools cutting back on recess time to maximize test scores. To avoid lawsuits, touching games such as tag are being banned on playgrounds. Forced back indoors for more seat time, it is no wonder deskbound students look so bored.
S.T.E.M. can be a part of the solution. Here the students are in class, but they are actively engaged in engineering a solution to a problem. What we see as instruction, they see as fun. And this is really how learning should occur. Brains like to learn and grow. They abhor boredom. Brains thrive on challenge. Who can keep their paper airplane in the air the longest? Who can build the strongest tower? How can we make the rocket fly straighter? To a brain, these are not obstacles; they are challenges and opportunities.
Stephan Turnipseed, president of Lego Education, North America, says it best: “Creativity is at the foundation of innovation and is vital for our country's growth and development. Creativity fuels all areas of our country's economy and prosperity.” He goes on to report that scores on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking have been declining among elementary students.
The solution is simple; S.T.E.M. activities move students away from rote learning into creative and innovative environments. I’m always amazed when we start a new S.T.E.M. lesson because I have a preconceived idea of how I would solve the problem. My perspective prevents me from seeing the solution in other ways. But invariably a student will solve the problem in a way that gives me an “Aha!” moment.
My students struggled with their vinegar and baking soda powered jet cars. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t delay the reaction in a reliable way that allowed them to get the bottle capped in time. If they did slow the reaction down enough to cap the bottle, the foam oozed out the nozzle without generating enough thrust. They needed a way to get all the baking soda into the vinegar and than have it react at once. One group of students finally decided to fill their bottle half full of vinegar and float test tubes half filled with baking soda inside. The tubes floated perfectly just above the surface and no vinegar reacted with them until the car was tipped sideways on the ground. Then the reaction was immediate. You can see the result at the end of the video in this link.
On another occasion, my students had to make vibrating robot bugs out of electric toothbrushes. The problem was getting them to go straight. I showed them how to make paperclip legs that allowed it to walk in a wiggly but unpredictable way. However, when they realized that the bugs didn’t necessarily walk straight, my students devised skis and even propellers to get better results. You can see a video of them at this link and download the Vibrobots activity here.
When we are working on a S.T.E.M. project, my students often come into my room during their lunch break. They are sacrificing what little play time we offer them to design, to build, and to innovate. I think that’s proof that their brains are enjoying the creative process of learning that S.T.E.M. instruction offers.