The past four weeks have a great overall experience that any educator could only hope to have. STEM education has been and will be a crucial part of educating youth for the foreseeable future. Educators today need to focus not only on STEM content but also the success skills and technology skills needed to apply knowledge in present day careers. These skills have been researched extensively and are well known as ones that absolutely need to be targeted in any lesson. What educators have found difficult is how to successfully target these skills in ways that they are used in STEM career fields.
The biggest success during these last four weeks would have to be seeing these success skills used in all aspects of STEM career fields. I have taken part in leadership meetings, customer service problem solving sessions, helped maintenance fix heavy machinery, seen most of the automated machines in action, shadowed floor technicians, and had multiple discussions/ interviews with mechanical and electrical engineers. Each one of these instances were invaluable for me as an educator. I was able to see various different success skills being applied in various different STEM business settings. It was interesting to see the different combination of skills needed to complete different daily tasks. Problem solving on the floor, for example, is a different process and needs distinct technical skills. Problem solving in leadership meetings is a much different process and requires an abundance of communication, active listening, and collaboration skills. Being able to integrate these skills in my science lab units will be much easier now that I have seen them applied in real-world STEM scenarios.
There haven’t been many things that I could consider big challenges so far. One small challenge I have ran into is the sheer complexity of everything involved in STEM career fields. Everything from the computer programming involved in teaching automated machines to be accurate within a few microns to value stream discussions involving every single aspect of the business was a little complicated to comprehend right off the bat. Part of this was due to the technical terminology being used and part was my own education on topics being discussed. One of the first things I reflected on while my head was initially spinning involved how educators could begin tackling the challenge of creating very well-rounded students with capabilities to tackle such a detailed and complicated career that you find in STEM companies.
Overall, this has been an unbelievable experience. It is hard to put into words how beneficial it has been for my educational career growth. I have had so many ideas about the future of my science lab. Having an Integrative STEM Education background, I view my science lab classroom as a place where more than typical labs/experiments take place. I want to eventually use project-based design units to teach all elementary school science standards. This internship has given me the confidence and new knowledge sets needed to start tackling this classroom transition.