24 Oct 2016 Educators explore best ways to immerse students in STEM
Nearly 170 educators from more than 20 public school districts and three private schools gathered on Sept. 27 for a deep dive into how to best immerse students in STEM. Using a strategic planning process to improve STEM education (the Carnegie STEM Excellence Pathway) as their guide, teams from each school evaluated six STEM learning components:
- Teacher Qualifications and Development
- Curriculum
- Instructional Practices
- Assessment and Demonstration of Skills
- Family Engagement
- Real-World Connections
To generate ideas for engagement and real-world connections, the workshop included a roundtable with 5-minute presentations on everything from student-launched satellite experiments to networking for teachers to STEM field trip opportunities.
The speakers included:
- Ardusat founder Sunny Washington
- Discovery Place Education Studio Director Kellen Nixon
- Elevate EDU‘s Laura Gilchrist
- Google Fiber–Create Your World‘s Rachel Merlo
- Kansas City Young Audiences‘s Kara Armstrong
- Kansas Enrichment Network‘s Brandon Hutton
- KC STEM Alliance’s Ann Zimmerman update on LRNG-KC
- Pear Deck‘s Nick Park
- Museum at Prairie Fire‘s Donna Deeds
- PLTW Director of School Engagement Andrea Holzwarth
Special guests for the day included (from left) Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Tom Schlimpert and Shelly Wehmeyer and Brian Crouse of the Missouri Math and Science Coalition, pictured with KC STEM Alliance Executive Director Martha McCabe. Tom is Director of Engineering and Technology Education; Shelly is Director of Health Science Education at DESE.
Thanks to the Sprint Accelerator and Think Big Coworking for sharing your beautiful spaces for this day of collaborative thinking.