We’re constantly venting about the need for an updated education and curricula in our schools and educators are finally starting to take notice. Unfortunately, we can’t take all the credit, but we’d like to think that we play a small role in helping usher teachers into the 21st century. Now that most schools in the country and in the world are focusing a lot more on STEM education, upgrades need to be made to that as well. What’s the saying? Most of what you learn is obsolete two years from now? Well, it’s something like that.
STEM Education By the Numbers
If you’re a STEM teacher, there’s a pretty decent chance you like math, analytics, or some combination of cool and relevant statistics. That’s fortunate because we’re going to hit you with some numbers in this first section. It only seemed appropriate in an article about keeping STEM up to date. Let us just preface this by saying that these are numbers as of November 2017, according to eLearning Infographics. They could very well change (in any direction) in the coming months and years. But, as of right now, there are 26 million STEM jobs in the workforce of the United States alone.That accounts for about 20 percent of the entire workforce. Do you know how many workers—specifically college graduates—are prepared to fill those jobs? Not 26 million, that’s for sure.
The current workforce is also extremely volatile—and will continue to be as time goes on. In fact, 65 percent of today’s K-12 students will be taking jobs that have not even been invented yet when they enter the workforce, whenever that may be. This should come as no surprise, but STEM jobs are expected to grow at a rate much faster than that of average contemporary occupations. The compensation is also much higher. STEM professionals routinely make more money than the average worker and it can get up to a point where it’s not even close. In their report, eLearning Infographics also said that, in 2013, only 44 percent of high school graduates were prepared to take on college-level math while those who complete Algebra II in high school are twice as likely to earn a 4-year degree. Only 36 percent were prepared for college-level science as well—a couple of numbers that are much too low.
STEM education also needs to become more appealing to women and younger girls while they are in elementary and middle school. The sad truth is that many girls lose interest in STEM very early on because they hold the inherent belief that it’s only for boys. It is estimated that 74 percent of middle school girls express some sort of interest in STEM education, but that only a miniscule 0.4 percent of high school girls choose to pursue STEM in college. That leads to women making up less than 25 percent of the current STEM workforce. Since girls are oftentimes unavailable to fill the huge number of available STEM jobs, the large amount of availability is only going to increase. In fact, the U.S. Dept. of Labor estimates that by 2020, there will be more than 1.4 million unfilled computing jobs. Only about 30 percent of them will be able to be filled at the current rate. Something needs to change.
The Present and Future of STEM Education
It’s hard, nowadays, to find a school program that’s not embracing the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math just a bit more so than they have done in the past. This is in part because they offer students much more opportunity for engagement, but also because it’s much more necessary. Studying these subjects helps societies to transcend and so much of our everyday actions are based on scientific achievements—like using a smartphone to get from place to place, for example. Right now, technology is at the most advanced stage it’s ever been (though this likely will not remain true for very long) and that’s why we feel its importance more than ever. Technology is transforming just about every professional sector, which has led to a direct shift in the focus on teaching STEM skills.
Since the changing economy is rewarding to those with STEM skills, the way students are taught is being overhauled. Every year, STEM education seems to gain a new level of momentum as it’s the best way to prepare students for the future of many jobs. The hands-on nature of STEM work is designed to help students become creators not just consumers. It’s helping them grow into coders, designers, and innovators who are not afraid to fail and come up with new ways to solve problems. So many resources have been introduced to teachers since the emergence of STEM education came about. Everything from robotics kits to codable toys can be used to help kids start down the right path from a very young age. Right now, early STEM education centers on creating beneficial experiences that mix learning with play and, as kids get older, they are doing everything from programming and 3D printing to designing and creating their own mobile apps.
In the future, the early introduction of STEM learning should remain a regular aspect of elementary school. It should also become much more fluid, meaning that specialized curricula could become a regular thing and help students transition seamlessly from STEM experiences in the early grades to STEM experiences later on down the road. They’ll still be tasked with using technology and their creative skills to maximize efficiency and solve problems in unique ways only it seems very much possible that the technology will be far more advanced. With more money being poured into the advancement of STEM education across the world, it seems likely that we have only now scratched the surface of what it is going to be. Who knows—maybe a few years from now 3D printing will be common in kindergarten and building robots will trickle down to a standard early elementary activity. So, what would that leave for middle and high school students? Possibly learning how to do something that hasn’t even been invented yet.
Finding Success with Early STEM Education
One of the greatest things about STEM education is that it’s hands-on. And, one of the greatest things about hands-on education is that there is a lot of failure associated with it. We don’t mean this in a bad way, either. In fact, some of the best learning experiences involve trial and error, reworking the problem-solving approach, and making adjustments using various tools. If you think this sounds like a great high school or college learning environment, you’re right. It is. It’s also attainable in the early grades, too, though. Each year, the STEM tools available to schools changes and improves, serving as an annual reminder of the volatility that comes with the territory. Getting to a point in which the most STEM success can be enjoyed often circles back to building upon the progress that was made the previous year.
Isn’t it great when you read an article and the author of that article spells out that there is some problem that needs to be solved or something that needs to be changed? Sure, but it’s even better when that author actually offers helpful solutions instead of just further illuminating the problem that you probably already knew about before clicking on the post. Well, we’re going to try to provide some easy-to-manage solutions for Early Ed teachers. The first thing to focus on is creating learning that allows students to use a step-by-step approach to solve problems. Along the way, EdTech is a great tool to use in order to tap a student’s critical thinking and enhance the quality of a lesson overall. It’s a very effective way to allow for problem-based learning as kids can explore relevant areas of learning, like coding, for example.
One of the goals of STEM education is illustrating to young students how they can take large amounts of information and break it down into usable chunks. This is especially important for students in the early grades. Most of what students are able to gather from the information available to them comes from their willingness to try new things and their lack of a fear to fail. It’s just as important that they are coming up with new and innovative ways to use technology as it is for a veteran programmer. Plus, most of them will jump at the chance to learn a new skill that they can continue developing as they use more and more technology. To that, we say ‘absolutely!’ Even though first and second graders are years away from entering a workforce, they still need to be prepared for an uncertain future. Even if coding is replaced by some new in-demand skill, they will still benefit from knowing how to try and fail productively. For teachers, Alice Keeler said it best: Teach to the future, not your comfort level.
Encouraging Students to Pursue STEM Careers
Wouldn’t it be great if teachers could just tell students to be interested in STEM and they would just develop an interest? Actually, wouldn’t it be great if students did everything their teachers said to do? In a perfect world, sure, this could happen. We don’t live in a perfect world, though, so, a lot of the time, teachers are forced to generate their students’ interest in STEM on their own. While there are a number of ways to begin building this interest, it seems to work well when started early on in a student’s life. It won’t work for every single student, but early exposure to computer science principles, coding, and even engineering can drastically increase the likelihood that they develop and keep an interest in STEM up to and through their college years.
Getting this to happen is not always easy, but teachers can create curricula that include hands-on STEM challenges rather than simply instructing kids to read about STEM principles. We understand that it’s difficult for a seven- or eight-year-old kid to wrap their head around the fact that if they pursue STEM and work on developing certain skills, they will probably be able to name their salary—never mind easily find a job later on down the road. To increase the chances in STEM interest among students, educators should try simply asking them what it is they are most interested in studying. Some might like robotics, some might like building things, and others might like creating designs on the computer. It just takes a little bit of question asking to find out what children are passionate about and then using various EdTech tools to create STEM learning centered around these things.
Aside from this, teachers can help students build STEM skills and interest by varying their teaching methods. They could turn learning into a game, make it more real-world relevant, or try creating some friendly competition among the class. Then, as students get older and presumably already have a somewhat significant interest in STEM, teachers can start hitting them with other facts. Like how there are hundreds of thousands of STEM jobs available right now. And that this number may only rise before it comes down. Having a guaranteed job and a fairly significant pay day could also help tip the scales. Students do, sometimes, need to be reminded that it doesn’t matter where they come from or what skills they do or do not possess. With practice and regular exposure to STEM, nothing will be able to stop them from doing what they really want to do—especially with constant encouragement from their teachers.
STEM and PBL Make the Perfect Combination
You get the idea that great STEM learning makes use of beneficial technology and that the best STEM experiences are the ones that allow students to explore hands-on work. Great. There is also a project-based component to STEM education and combining PBL and STEM is actually a very effective way to mirror real-world problem solving. Sure, these are two of the most highly talked about buzzwords in contemporary education, but that’s because they’re constantly relevant—and even more powerful when they’re paired up in the classroom. They’re also more similar than you might think and just about every K-12 school has found one way or another to make at least one of them a central component of their curricula.
It could be argued, actually, that project-based learning serves as a foundation on which teachers can build better STEM programs. That’s because PBL is a teaching approach that highlights real-world, authentic problems and encourages students to solve them in the context of their own lives. Why? Because this is what they will be doing in their careers after school. In order to solve the most challenging problems in the world, they are going to have to have practice doing so. This is true for students who pursue a STEM field, but also any other field in the modern workforce. In PBL, the value is in students building a capacity to think critically and creatively solve problems—not just simply arriving at the right answer to a question for the sake of moving on to the next one.
Another benefit of combining both PBL and STEM learning is that it results in an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. More importantly, students are no longer learning in isolation, but rather they’re collaborating and purposely being engaged in thought-provoking work by their teachers. This work requires that they make connections to the real world and utilize these observations to more effectively solve the problem that lies in front of them. Especially in PBL, students should be able to ascertain that real-world issues are generally not connected to one single subject. STEM can help them see this, too. If their robot does not work, for example, it might be due to one small misconnection or miscalculation. Altering that, however, could create a new problem and so on. This is what real-world learning is designed to replicate and STEM education is the ticket to ensuring children are as prepared as possible.
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