Product Description
“A focus on STEM engages our curiosity, beckons us to marvel, to ask questions, to cultivate childlike wonder, and alongside that a pursuit to understand. This is the joy of STEM.”
—Wendy Ward Hoffer
STEM content can feel daunting. Many elementary teachers don’t yet think of themselves as mathematicians or scientists and lack confidence in their abilities to teach STEM content. Who you are as a teacher informs who your students become. Consciously or unconsciously, your beliefs about STEM impact your behavior and instruction.
Wendy Ward Hoffer believes that we can each grow our own confidence and competence as STEM thinker and learners, then intentionally pass these attributes on to our students. With Wendy’s guidance, you will learn how to embrace a growth mindset and model the curiosity, persistence, flexibility, and positive regard for STEM needed to design and facilitate rich STEM experiences for all students. Each chapter includes current research findings along with concrete, practical approaches to help you make STEM learning meaningful and to foster students’ independence as mathematicians and scientists.
We are all scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technology creators and users, making sense of our own worlds every day. Bring positive STEM identities to life in your classroom and watch your students develop the dispositions and habits of mind that will spark bright STEM futures.
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Foreword x
Introduction xii
Chapter 1 We Teach Who We Are 1
Chapter 2 Beliefs: We Are All Scientists 12
Chapter 3 Mindset: Scientists Persevere 21
Chapter 4 Community: Scientists Are Interdependent 32
Chapter 5 Content: STEM Is Interconnected 43
Chapter 6 Tasks: Scientists Grapple 54
Chapter 7 Thinking: Scientists Are Thinkers 68
Chapter 8 Workshop: Understanding Takes Time 80
Chapter 9 Assessment: Scientists Share 92
Conclusion 102
Resources 105
References 108
This book will help you to identify why a STEM identity is important. Chapter 1 asks you to consider your own STEM identity, the forces that crafted it, and your associated beliefs. From there, each chapter will introduce a productive belief about STEM and describe how that belief can be enacted through intentional teacher behaviors and student learning experiences to support learners’ STEM identity development.
While this book is about STEM identity, I use the shorthand “scientist” to refer to one who engages with STEM, since the fields of technology, engineering, and mathematics can all be collected under the banner of science. Science as the overarching heading for the complex and interrelated studies known as STEM was proposed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Project 2061 in their publication Science for All Americans (1989). This interesting resource, which offers an overview of the content and history of scientific endeavor, includes chapters on “The Nature of Science,” “The Nature of Mathematics,” “The Nature of Technology,” and “The Designed World.” So, with no intended disrespect for any of the discrete but interwoven STEM fields, for the purpose of this text, we will call the explorers of each “scientists.”
As I worked to pull the content of this text apart into chapters, I felt as though I were trying to separate one big bowl of spaghetti into separate small portions: all the strands were connected, and when I tried to pull one out alone, I found it tangled up in the rest, all of which wanted to come along. The challenges for you, then, as a reader, will be to patiently savor each portion, or chapter, knowing that it is inextricably linked to all the others in the text. To illustrate this, cross-references are provided throughout, and I made an effort to avoid repetition and redundancy. The good news about this giant portion of spaghetti is that you don’t have to eat it all at once: taking any concept in this book, any chapter, and working to implement those ideas into your planning and instruction will have a ripple effect across all other aspects, catalyzing adjustments at a number of levels. The Appendix in the back offers you some resources that may be helpful as you move forward. Be gentle with yourself as you consider change; begin with something bite-sized, and soon learners’ whole experience might shift.
