Want to help prepare your students for the future? It's true, we don't know all of the job paths that will be available to our current students. New jobs are needed as technology is advancing and our needs are changing in education. Without knowing what specific jobs we are teaching our students for (like we did in the past, industrial model of education), we need to teach our students the skills needed to be successful in ANY career.
These are their 21st century/6Cs skills - Our district identifies these as: Collaboration, Communication, Content, Critical Thinking, Creative Innovation and Confidence. At the base of these skills, the key points we are teaching are our State and National Standards as well as our building curriculums. How can we teach these ever-important skills to our students AND teach them how to read, write and do math? STEAM!
STEAM integrates Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics into an activity, encouraging student engagement and covering curriculum and standards all while naturally presenting and teaching those important 21st century skills our students need for their futures.
Eryn and I are kindergarten teachers in a low-income, Spanish speaking district. We want coworkers to implement STEAM thinking activities in their classrooms to equip students with skills needed for careers in the 21st century. Below you will see the benefits of STEAM in the classroom, what resources we are using such as our influencer model and 4DX strategy, to help us with our plan, the research behind this style of teaching/learning as well as our proposal to incorporate this into our district. We plan to post our progress and planning to reflect on our innovative change within our district as well as to help others to make a change in their own organizations. With this plan, we will help our students to be prepared for their futures, have FUN learning and to be engaged with our lessons teaching our district/state/national kindergarten content.