There’s a big push for bringing STEM-type learning activities into traditional classrooms. For me, it’s been a little hard to understand what that should look like. In my science class, we often use math to explain what we are doing and technology is often woven throughout our lessons.
This year, however, I have taken a different track. To me, STEM is really about design thinking and problem solving. The facts, terms, and data are always going to change – but the cyclical processes of analysis, hypothesizing, testing and assessing are always present. So instead of adding traditional labs to my science classroom, I am adding challenges.
One example is a lab on permeability. Traditionally, I would give students a number of different ground coverings – coarse gravel, pea-gravel, sand, soil, powdered clay, etc. – and ask students to hypothesize how well water flows through them. Then, the students will test their hypotheses and analyze the data.
This is a typical middle school science lab, right? A little messy, but not too dangerous. The problem is, it’s also not very authentic. In the “real world”, people in the business of permeability already know the flow rates of those materials. What they have to do is apply that knowledge to a problem. I think the STEM component our classrooms lack, more often than not, is authentic problem solving that applies to the content being taught.
So this year, I changed it up.
Instead of making a lab that focused on the flow rates of each soil (the content knowledge) students got to ‘play’ with the materials over the course of one class period. I asked them to make notes on their findings, but stayed mainly hands-off. It was a day lost in inquiry – students making predictions that were confirmed or disproved. Day two was the challenge. Students were given three scenarios, based on real-world situations, in which they had to create a soil composite out of the available materials (application of the content knowledge). To do this, they had to analyze each situation and decide if they should try to trap water in the soil or allow it to flow through quickly. They then used their information from the day before to decide on a soil combination that might perform best. In the end, they had to share out with the class their rationale, their results, and their reflection. Overall, the conversations and planning I heard on day two (the challenge) showed an increased level of thinking, analysis, and evaluation – all things I had hoped. There are definitely things I will change the next time we attempt a challenge like this, but the students seemed to love the challenge and displayed far more critical thinking than during a normal demonstration-based lab.