Students have become more confident to share in class. A strong classroom environment has formed, and, in the process, fostered more resilient learners with a criticalthinking skillset that can be applied cross-curricularly.
“ It’ s more relatable for them. If you’ re looking to reach kids based on their varying abilities and background knowledge, this is the way to go. I do think it makes it more attainable for everybody,” said Ms. Mueller.
“ Our hope is that they understand that making mistakes is OK, and that they can become more resilient science learners, which they carry into other classes.”
Middle School
During a recent lesson, 5th grade teacher Marilyn Stump tasked her classes with researching human impact in their ecosystem. Stump was pleasantly surprised by her students’ feedback.
“ They were able to give me so much more information, as opposed to if it was just me standing up here talking about human impact,” said Ms. Stump.“ Now that they researched it and had to find something in their ecosystem that had human impact, they were able to tell me answers right away.”
“ These kids are better problem solvers. There’ s so much going on that they’ re aware of because of technology. They’ re able to find things at their fingertips that they’ re interested in. So when they come to the classroom, they’ re able to talk about something they’ ve looked at or are interested in.”
Stump, a veteran teacher, has embraced the changes that the STEELS standards have brought about. As learning gets more in-depth, and the terminology gets more abundant and complicated, Ms. Stump has been able to ease the transition for students who have graduated from the comforts of their elementary school and moved onto Gateway Middle.
The learning is phenomena-based, focusing on modeling, experimentation, analysis, videos, and other means to get students to observe something in the world, make a claim, and then support it with evidence.
“ The big thing is the phenomena, which is getting the kids to understand the natural world. It’ s almost like it’ s an inquiry and then you work towards collecting all the data,” said Ms. Stump.
“ We want them to collect all this information and then be able to support a claim or a fact about what they learned. For example, it could be stating that an invasive species has invaded an ecosystem and here’ s how we know.”
To meet the changing standards, Ms. Stump has incorporated plenty of group learning activities into her classroom. Collaborative learning has proved to have several benefits. Experimenting or learning in a group allows students to hear additional voices besides their teacher’ s.
Beyond that, Stump stresses to students to be active contributors, to use their strengths and find their place in a group, something that enables students to see how a work environment functions and what career they might want to pursue within that environment.
“ Sometimes they learn more from their peers by watching what they do or how they’ re looking at something as opposed to a teacher always talking about the content,” said Ms. Stump.
“ It’ s a higher level of thinking. It’ s not just‘ let’ s know the vocabulary’, it’ s what we talked about along the way. I say sometimes that this is a job you might be interested in, this is what engineers do, this is what scientists do. It kind of helps them understand what part of the process they might be good at and if they’ re interested in that.”
High School
Shari Morasco, a high school Anatomy & Physiology teacher and the K-12 Science Curriculum Director, stresses that Gateway High School has long had a culture of handson activities and modeling, fostered by generations of teachers before her. With the implementation of STEELS, the amount of modeling is honed in even further.
“ We’ re fortunate at the high school because we’ ve always had a lot of modeling in our courses, which was started by the generation of teachers before me” said Ms. Morasco.
“ Throughout all of my years here, the administration has been supportive with buying supplies and equipment for labs and activities.”
For Ms. Morasco’ s Anatomy class, modeling— and following a STEELS methodology— has proved effective for her students. At the onset of her course, students must put together bones to build a human skeleton correctly, an activity that is repeated several times over throughout a term.
As the learning progresses, the hands-on nature allows students to dive deeper. Ms. Morasco points to her chalkboard, displaying the four muscles of a rotator cuff: the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis. The words are quite, well, wordy. But by making the students identify each of the muscles on a shoulder model, learning them becomes easier.
Ms. Morasco stresses that her students have much better retention because of the integration of STEELS-type activities.
“ You can approach lessons from a mile-wide, inchdeep philosophy or you can focus on fewer topics and go more in-depth. The designing and modeling components of STEELS moves instruction to a deeper level, which ultimately leads to recall and learning.”
Elsewhere at Gateway High School, teachers have implemented modeling to deconstruct complicated topics. In a biology classroom, Amy Miller is teaching meiosis.
“ Instead of having students labeling a picture that illustrates cell division, Amy has them building models that show the different phases of meiosis using pop beads to show crossing over and the exchange of genes,” said Ms. Morasco.“ When students physically have to create a model and show crossing over, they understand it.”
In years to come, Ms. Morasco believes STEELS-educated students will not just be more resilient and confident, but more comfortable with the hands-on nature of learning that has become commonplace at Gateway High School. Eliminating that learning curve will allow teachers to take their instruction to the next level.
“ We’ ll be able to focus on critical thinking and application in our lessons, expanding them to challenge this new generation of learners,” said Ms. Morasco. ateway
GATEWAY SCHOOL DISTRICT
MONROEVILLE ❘ SUMMER 2026 27