Student Teaching Reflection 4

This week, I am STILL not in a classroom, but I am finally in contact with the teacher who will be my mentor teacher, so hopefully my internship will begin within a week or 2. However, there have been some new programs introduced to the company I work for that have gotten me thinking about STEM, what it means, and how I will effectively integrate STEM concepts and practices into my teaching. The company that I work for offers before and after school care for students in grades K-6. Currently, they are pushing new activities and marketing the program as a STEAM program rather than just daycare. I, being a STEM-teacher-in-training, was immensely excited about this change and was really looking forward to hearing about some of the new activities that our curriculum directors were coming up with. I was then very disappointed to learn that the company would be using the same activities and just labeling them differently. Now, there is nothing wrong with the activities that we are given now, except that many of them do not promote some core STEM/STEAM practices like creativity or cooperation. The art projects given are simply colorless toys that the children color with sharpies, and many of the "science" or "engineering" activities don't give the kids any freedom to try their own ideas or test how things might work. I began to think about how this relates to our class discussion of purposeful questioning. The leaders in the company that I work for have the best intentions in finding or creating these activities, but in practice, the activities aren't meeting the standards that are expected in a STEM/STEAM activity. The same goes for purposeful questioning. A teacher can have the best intentions and expect great discussions and higher order thinking to come out of a question, but if it is not happening in practice, that teacher needs to re-evaluate the questioning. This entire situation at work made me even more aware that as a teacher, I will need to constantly evaluate whether my activities, questions, and assessments are doing what I want and expect them to do.