A Conversation on Innate Curiousity and STEM
by Behnosh Najafi | | Posted under
Seattle STEM Fellowship Meeting, 3 November 2012
by Pam Forbush, Co-Facilitator of the STEM Afterschool Matters Fellowship
[This article is 4th in a series on the STEM Afterschool Matters Fellowship, an intensive research project for afterschool providers and school teachers.]
Our fourth meeting together was full of brainstorming, learning more about each other’s research questions and delving into our own. We also shared our observation experiences and discussed what types of data collection would be the most useful to us at our work sites. And as we began our reading and writing, a fellow shared these two quotes with us:
- “I failed my way to success,” Thomas Edison
- “We learn wisdom from failure, much more than success. We often discover what we will do, by finding out what we will not do.” Samuel Smiles
We each wrote our “big” question that we are passionate about and plan to use for our action research, on a sheet of paper. We passed these clock-wise around the table, and each person commented or added a resource or question to our paper. Eventually we got our paper back with others’ ideas added. When we got these questions and responses back, we spent a short time writing reflectively, then shared one sentence from the reflection. We found a lot of connections!
Our big conversation today was how do we tap into the innate curiosity of our youth in STEM related topics and honor that curiosity and those questions and interests in planning of the classwork and the activities that we do with them, especially with our struggling youth? Here is part of our conversational highlights.
- In education when kids would come up with questions not related to the class focus, we wrote them up on the wall. Any kids interested in the question, could do research, bring in and share the answer with the class and earn bonus points that were required for an A in the class.
- Make connections with things in which they are familiar, but don’t automatically see the connections. For example, one student being tutored for math had an interest in turtles, and so his tutor is working to tie that in with math concepts; design a pond and calculate the area, etc.
- When needing to meet standards, connected questions, and a set of other math questions (i.e. why do we use italicized x’s instead of regular font?) Kids get a reward for the answer, and they get very excited.
- Learning engineering curriculum along with the kids encouraged enthusiasm – teacher was genuinely curious. Not knowing sometimes helps with enthusiasm, and there really are no right or wrong answers. Sharing our enthusiasm for learning and sharing our wondering are powerful tools.
- It’s great when you feel you can go with the kids and their interests. If they change direction, that’s OK.
- Standards are sometimes different in afterschool – the goal is curiosity and following kids interests. For one educator, math is a tool to allow you to work in other media. She’s been thinking of putting together a “math toolbox”. Maybe part of that could be the standards written in kid-friendly language. They could put in the things that they know how to use. She could refer kids back to their toolboxes when they have questions. This reminds them of their strengths.
- Try to anticipate students’ curiosities. For example when doing an outdoor ed. unit re: salmon habitat, kids will see ducks and want to know more about them. The youth worker thinks about how to connect the ducks back to the salmon. She has flexibility to go with those interests, and anticipates them so that she is prepared.
- In an alternative school, the premise is all about channeling student interest. They begin with getting questions from kids and then determining which questions could go together to form working groups. Teachers also listed their questions and interests.
- One teacher has kids who skipped a year, so needs to be sure they have mastery over the standards they skipped. They take a tally of how they spend their time, to check understanding of ratios. This assignment nobody skipped, as they all became very engaged and started coming up with their own questions. For middle school kids, it’s about them all the time; if it doesn’t interest them, they are just doing it because they have to.
- In one classroom, kids were looking at ads and expressing their thoughts on relative effectiveness. Nobody thought ratios were used often in ads so the teacher challenged them to look for ads in the print and/or media to see if they could find any with ratios and bring them in to share.
- Looking at ads, kids made truth tables. If a is b, then b is c – kids looked at ads to talk about what was really true.
- Dream box – similar to parking lot – Kids come up with idea, and people decide if they have the resources to explore the idea. If not, it goes in the dream box, which makes it different than just saying “no we can’t”. The ideas get revisited periodically.
- In one class, the kids don’t like to simplify. They did cooking in class. The teacher’s mom is a great cook, but bad at math. She tells the kids to write recipes so that her mom can get it. “would my mom be able to get 9/4ths?” The kids really get it.
- Putting something unusual in the environment – kids become curious about it and start to ask questions.
- Students can be more inflexible in their thinking than we realize. They don’t want us to mess up what they understand; challenge their preconceived notions. It may be that the kids need control over something, and cling to what they think they control. Maybe have a “safe box”. This is the place where you put the things you know. They are safe there. You do know them. Then move on.
And as usual we ended our day writing about what we will accomplish in the next two week and we will know if we met our objectives. Writing a second analytical essay, practicing observational techniques and collecting other data relevant to our research, and of course being reflective about our practice.
Read more blog entries from the Afterschool Matters Fellowship.
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