Teaching is difficult. How do we as teachers motivate, challenge, and communicate our enthusiasm for our subject to middle school students? The demands on teachers are increasing rapidly and trying new and different teaching tools and strategies to get students to think out-of-the-box requires much energy as well as time for study, for testing and for trying new strategies. Over a fifty- year career this science educator has witnessed an incredible information explosion paired with amazing technological advances. This explosion, along with the disintegration of the traditional family, negatively impacted teaching and learning! As a result, classroom instruction as I learned it became obsolete and change in instruction became imperative to meet the global needs of our “new formed” students. To meet this challenge, educators had to change their teaching role from a disseminator of information to a facilitator of student-centered inquiry or project-based learning (PBL). Sanders (2009) stated, “Seasoned educators understand the importance of interest and motivation in learning, constructs validated by the findings of cognitive scientists over the past three decades. It follows, therefore, that integrative STEM instruction, implemented throughout the P-12 curriculum, has potential for greatly increasing the percentage of students who become interested in STEM subjects and STEM fields.” Recently in my graduate STEM class, eight elementary and middle school teachers formed a STEM team to do the Project Learning Tree lesson, How Big Is your Tree? The team’s task was to determine how many board feet of lumber would be needed to frame a 1, 024 square foot house and then to build this framed house to scale.
Each team member assumed responsibilities for a task , two members did the mathematics, two became the civil engineers, one video typed during construction, one used SketchUp to draw the house in a 3D model to scale, and the remaining members developed and wrote a 5E lesson with student instruction sheets for teachers to use in any classroom. The project-based lesson was completed and a finished framed, craft stick house was placed on display. This experience fits nicely into a multidisciplinary (thematic) unit.
.... educators had to change their teaching role from a disseminator of information to a facilitator of student-centered inquiry or project-based learning (PBL).
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