Picking up STEAM: Elementary schools emphasize creativity, innovation | Chesterfield Observer
COURTESY OF CCPS
To the untrained eye, a cluster of kids blowing bubbles, building with Legos or playing games on a tablet might not appear to be studying, but Spring Run Elementary principal Chris Hart knows better. Activities like these are common assignments in Spring Run’s STEAM lab, one of a handful of innovation-incubating classrooms that opened in Chesterfield County elementary schools in 2017.
“We like to keep experimenting and letting kids be curious,” Hart says. “There’s power in play. Imagination is a wonderful thing.”
STEAM is the lesser-known younger sibling to STEM, the education acronym that has stood for science, technology, engineering and mathematics since 2001.
“Across the country, STEM is a big thing, and Chesterfield added the A,” which stands for art, explains Hart.
Chesterfield isn’t alone. Nationwide, schools are increasingly emphasizing an interdisciplinary approach to teaching subjects that were once treated as separate. In essence, STEAM students learn about math, science, programming and coding while using art and design principles and by telling stories with their projects. The goal? To encourage experiential learning, creative problem solving, thoughtful risk taking and collaboration – skills that are considered critical in the 21st-century economy.
STEAM curriculums date back to 2010, when Rhode Island School of Design faculty began advocating for art and design to be part of STEM learning, which was already in place at many public schools across the country. By incorporating the arts (such as fine arts, music, language, physical arts, etc.) into scientific lessons, the STEAM approach encourages students to explore, experiment and innovate, exercising both sides of their brain at once.
Grange Hall students blow bubbles from wands they designed themselves using 3D-printing pens. BRITTANY BALLOU
When Hart became principal at Spring Run six years ago, STEM methods were mostly being taught at the middle and high school level in the county.
“I thought this would be a great school to be involved in STEM-themed learning, really just showing teachers what’s possible and being open to inquiry,” he says. “Make things messy, you know?”
Heading into the 2017-18 school year, then-Superintendent James Lane encouraged elementary schools to consider STEAM, allowing schools to hire STEAM teachers in place of computer lab teachers. That’s when Spring Run transitioned from STEM curriculum to STEAM curriculum, and opened its STEAM lab.
Today, Spring Run has a full-time STEAM teacher and an itinerant teacher shared with other county schools, and every student from kindergarten through fifth grade spends time coding, building and inventing. The school’s STEAM lab has a 3D printer that makes Huskies (the school’s mascot) keychains, a prize for good behavior, and instead of traditional rows of desks, chairs and blackboards, students have more flexible seating, including large round tables with their own whiteboards for planning projects.
For the youngest students, STEAM teacher Jeannine Dearmon demonstrates the concept of directional coding by having them walk on gym mats. They learn to step forward one square, then to the right or left and then over to a third square, which teaches them about following directions in a given sequence, the building blocks for coding.
By second grade, children are using computers, tablets and even robots. “Every single level does some sort of coding,” Dearmon says, like “putting puzzle pieces in the right place and right sequence. Each grade level builds a little bit more.”
Today, Chesterfield County has 21 full-time STEAM teachers in its 39 elementary schools, and some schools offer STEAM-themed summer programming like coding camps. Most projects align with specific expectations in the Standards of Learning. When students enter middle and high school, the dedicated STEAM classrooms and teachers go away, but the concepts are integrated into traditional science and technology classes. A countywide STEAMmania event in January offers challenges for K-5 students to compete in, while a STEAM Expo in March does the same for older students.
Spring Run STEAM students collaborate to engineer their own designs out of straws and connectors. JEANNINE DEARMON
What makes STEAM different from STEM, says Grange Hall Elementary teacher Brittany Ballou, is that she asks her students to “create something unique” that shows their creative viewpoint while learning math and science skills.
For instance, Ballou assigned her students a project to “create a new toy for Santa,” which gave them the opportunity to make a plaything with different functions and aesthetics. Both Dearmon and Ballou have classrooms full of cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and other recyclables, as well as art supplies, computers, tablets and tools to create robotics.
Group work is an important part of the curriculum, and Dearmon says that since starting to teach STEAM at Spring Run in 2017-18, she has seen a major difference in how students work together on projects and take educational leaps and risks. That first year, when something didn’t work, she says, “They used to get upset and cry before. Now they take risks. That is, to me, the biggest thing I’ve seen over the past two years.”
Chesterfield had only 10 STEAM teachers in the 2017-18 school year, Ballou recalls, and they met every couple of months to discuss ideas and issues, sharing knowledge from their classrooms. Today, they meet less often, but many STEAM educators are on Twitter, which provides a platform for Ballou and her fellow teachers to ask questions or get feedback on an idea.
One reason Ballou went into teaching was to get more girls involved in math and science, “showing them they don’t have to fit into stereotypes,” she says. STEAM has become one way to do that. Like Dearmon, she’s seen students try more new things and take risks, such as competing in Grange Hall’s STEAMmania competition for everyone from kindergarten through fifth grade.
Challenged to create something unique using a new building material, a first-grader at Grange Hall Elementary displays the giraffe she built out of interlocking plastic discs. COURTESY OF CCPS
Last year, two third-grade girls at Spring Run won the international Wonder League Robotics Competition, a coding contest that included more than 7,000 students in two age groups, winning $5,000 after solving a robotics problem. This year, the school had a four-girl team reach the finals.
“That really sticks in my mind,” Hart says. “That is why we’re doing this. They were exposed to this way of thinking at this young age.”
Ballou says she often talks to her students about potential career paths, including “how jobs you want in the future may not exist yet,” and gives fifth-graders direction about which middle-school electives they may want to pursue.
Hart often goes to educational technology conferences with teachers or sends them alone, so they can bring ideas back to the classroom – for students and other teachers. At a recent International Society for Technology in Education conference, futurists spoke about artificial intelligence and virtual reality and their place in the classroom, Hart says.
One popular app-driven device called the Merge Cube lets students interact with 3D holograms that teach them lessons on anatomy, the solar system and how to make virtual buildings. Another trend, Hart says, is storytelling and learning through video, such as with an app called Flipgrid, which gives students a chance to post short videos that share what they’ve learned during a lesson.
“Gamification of education is a big trend, also,” Hart says, noting that using gaming apps like Kahoot and Gimkit, which let users create their own quizzes and lesson-review games, doesn’t mean children are goofing off in class. They’re just using these apps to learn in a new way.
“I think it’s absolutely essential that schools today have a different focus and think about opportunities for kids to explore, try things,” Hart says. “The more we do that, the more 21st-century skills they develop.” |