National Conference in Chicago

All students should have the opportunity to attain high levels of scientific literacy, regardless of cultural, ethnic, or socioeconomic background; disabilities; gender; or age. This strand will explore ways that teachers can help students participate in society’s science conversations and be able to make personal decisions using their science knowledge.

This is becoming increasingly more important as we can envision the future creating significant challenges for today’s young students who will need to participate in solving global problems by applying principles of scientific thinking and processes and science understanding to become scientific-literate adults.

To best prepare our students, educators must create a safe and comfortable environment in which students can ask questions and share ideas from their own everyday life and living experiences.

Encouraging students to describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena, and develop solutions to problems will facilitate learning opportunities that integrate science and STEM literacy skill development.

Further expanding on these skills during a student’s early years will better support that student’s development of scientific literacy into adulthood. By using real-world applications of science or science in use we encourage students to become critical consumers, problem solvers, and change makers. Particular emphasis will be placed on sessions that integrate science with one of more areas (technology, engineering, math) and use real-world phenomena or problems to drive learning.

The language of science can be complex and confusing for all students. Many words that we use in everyday life have different meanings from the way they are used in science or STEM classrooms. To provide equitable opportunities for all students to engage in STEM, teachers must be aware of their students’ proficiency levels and challenges with the academic language of science, and provide opportunities for ALL students to develop language over the course of a unit as they are also developing science knowledge as opposed to approaching science language and vocabulary as a prerequisite of instruction.

Inquiry-based STEM and sensemaking is a collaborative process that positions students as acting and thinking like scientists and engineers. This process encourages students to raise questions and to explore both phenomena in their world and their interests based on their own life experiences and backgrounds. By empowering students to share their own observations with questions that prompt their natural curiosities, teachers can facilitate better learning and develop a more conceptual understanding of science and STEM. This strand will explore how the science in use approach combined with a language in use approach can best support and engage ALL students during instruction and make the learning environment more inclusive for all students, but especially for multilingual learners. Particular emphasis will be placed on sessions that incorporate the language in use approach and/or target multilingual learners.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin

Most of us are aware that learning is an integral part of our life. However, classroom learning can be a daunting process and often requires continuous involvement from all parties to be successful. In order to best support all students, the learning process requires regular review and verification by both the student and teacher. This strand will explore effective assessment tools and resources as well as what makes an assessment tool effective.

STEM assessments should also be viewed as a process. No one test should be used to demonstrate a complete summary of a student’s academic achievement. Rather, a series of various strategies should be implemented to diagnose student learning, and this diagnosis should be used to make decisions about the next step of instruction. While there are various forms of assessment used for this verification, it is important to remember that if an educator cannot easily and readily administer and evaluate an assessment to diagnose where a particular student is in relation to the learning goals for all, it will likely not be an effective tool.

There are many considerations for effective assessment, including reliability, validity, inclusivity, objectivity, and practicality. The must-haves for three-dimensional assessment include a focus on phenomena or problems, opportunities for students to engage in sensemaking, a focus on equity, and requiring students to use both science ideas/concepts and practices.

In order to widen students’ participation and interest in STEM, educators need to actively engage, recruit, and nurture a more inclusive environment where all students are learning, growing, and becoming more proficient at solving the problems they will face now and as adults. However, effective broadening participation cannot be realized without cultural and institutional change.

This strand will share tools that will develop and implement systems for expanding students’ participation and successes in STEM. Particular emphasis will be placed on sessions that support leaders and distributed leadership teams in creating communities that expand access and participation in STEM for all.

As a community of educators, we must develop accountability for reducing barriers for all—especially those in underrepresented groups and those with disabilities—to ensure an educational system that is dedicated to create STEM pathways throughout a student’s academic career, preK–16+. This is a critical step toward achieving a STEM workforce that reflects and celebrates the diversity of our society.

All students benefit from an inclusive environment. While creating an inclusive STEM learning environment may seem challenging, it can be done in a way that supports engagement, challenges, and interaction among all learners, regardless of differences. Creating an accessible environment where all students work together is a necessary first step toward a more inclusive experience. In this strand, we will share ideas for creating inclusive practices that enhance student learning and decrease social disparities in STEM education.

Inclusive STEM learning environments acknowledge and demonstrate the value of shared experiences of students from different backgrounds, are void of stereotypes that can marginalize students, and encourage alternative perspectives and ideas while promoting scientific understanding. These environments also encourage an equitable sharing of ideas by students and honor multiple ways of knowing and sharing knowledge. What better way can we, as educators, build confidence, provide support, teach tolerance of differences, and promote various pathways to success?

When students-as-scientists have authentic, relevant opportunities to actively make sense of the world—we call that sensemaking—science learning becomes engaging, accessible, and important to ALL students. Four attributes of sensemaking are phenomena, science and engineering practices, student ideas, and science ideas (grade-appropriate disciplinary core ideas). In this strand, we invite educators to share how they have integrated the pillar(s) of sensemaking into their practice. Particular emphasis will be placed on sessions that provide strategies for design using at least one of the pillars in combination with student work, student video, or other illustration of the impact of these strategies on student learning.

Teachers have always faced an abundance of stress, but their typically stress-filled school days are minor in comparison to what they have experienced since the beginning of the pandemic. This strand will explore some of the successful techniques, tactics, and resources that provide social and emotional learning programs to support and encourage a teacher’s self-care.

As a result of the pandemic, educators have been thrown into a whole new set of challenges: balancing the personal grieving from losing those close to them, being introduced to online teaching at the beginning of the pandemic, and re-grouping in light of the reopening of schools with new structures and mandates (or associated political challenges). It’s no wonder so many educators have found themselves in “crisis mode.”

Most schools and districts have adopted successful hybrid teaching solutions to support our students. These new teaching strategies rely on approaches that combine different communication modes that integrate synchronous and asynchronous learning in an effort to accommodate as many students as possible, under various circumstances. However, these strategies have not lessened the social and emotional impact on teachers or administrators. In fact, these may further burden educators who are having difficulties navigating this new environment.

While the pandemic caused a disruption to traditional face-to-face teaching and learning, we have all been faced with evaluating our education system and identifying those things that are essential to effective learning. Equally important, we also learned what was least effective. In this strand we will share lessons that have positively impacted student learning, participation, and engagement and how we can best assimilate these lessons into face-to-face teaching.

The transition between teaching face-to-face, remote, and in hybrid modes has not been easy. But, these transitions have given us great opportunities to consider the content of our teaching and its presentation rather than the actual teaching environments.

Remote and hybrid teaching have exposed possibilities that we had never before considered. We have been forced to become more creative and innovative in our teaching, our teaching environments, and our interactions with students.