"STEM requires students to actively engage"
I learned early in my career – through the process of many failed lesson plans – that students must be doing something or they are not learning. Learning is not a passive endeavor or a spectator sport. If a student’s primary task was sitting and listening to me, I was asking for trouble. A bored mind is a dangerous mind.
For that reason, I always made sure that students had an active role in the learning process. That might be something as simple as taking notes, but they had to be physically engaged in some way.In S.T.E.M. instruction and problem-based learning, students are engaged at the most intensive levels. Instead of the teacher demonstrating content knowledge, the student is constructing it through their own physical experiences.It could be argued that direct instruction takes much less time than waiting for students to learn skills that we already know, and that would be true if content knowledge were the our only goal. While it’s true that the clock on the wall often dictates our instructional approach, problem-based learning not only helps students gain new content knowledge; it also develops problem-solvers. The student who gains their information solely from a teacher never learns the skills that allows them to be an independent and ongoing learner.Furthermore, even in a S.T.E.M.-based curriculum there is a place for direct instruction of content knowledge. My typical week intersperses build days with content days. On content days, students learn the skills that will make them better engineers and problem-solvers.And brains like to learn this way. Brains abhor boredom and seek challenge. They like to encounter discrepancy and novelty and conquer it. We even have a saying for that: “I want to get my mind around that.” When students understand the connection between knowledge of content skills and the solutions they are trying to engineer, they are much more likely to remain engaged during necessary periods of direct instruction. Their brains see the value in it.I once read that if a student in my class is bored, it’s not their brain’s fault. That simple quote gave me a new perspective on how I teach. I endeavor each day to maximize the involvement of my students. Engagement is maximized when we achieve the three A’s: affective engagement, active engagement, and academic engagement. This is to say that students must care about what they are learning and enjoy it. They must physically engage in it in some way. And when these two preconditions are met, they will engage in the academics of the task. The brain follows where the heart and the feet lead. S.T.E.M. is the pathway for the trio.
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