6.5 Students personalize and self-direct their STEM learning experiences by STEM educators who facilitate their learning.
As part of our “Leader in Me” focus, students in many classrooms keep data notebooks as a way to monitor progress of their own learning and to self-reflect on strengths, goals, and areas for improvement. These data notebooks, along with “Meeting Mats” and goal reflections, are used by students to share their learning and progress with family members during fall and spring student-led conferences. These are also ways for students to “Start with the End in Mind” by setting school, classroom, and personal mission statements, which are also continuously reflected upon and evaluated.
Below are some excerpts from a fourth grader’s data notebook, showing her metacognition, personal mission statement, and goal-setting strategies.
As part of our “Leader in Me” focus, students in many classrooms keep data notebooks as a way to monitor progress of their own learning and to self-reflect on strengths, goals, and areas for improvement. These data notebooks, along with “Meeting Mats” and goal reflections, are used by students to share their learning and progress with family members during fall and spring student-led conferences. These are also ways for students to “Start with the End in Mind” by setting school, classroom, and personal mission statements, which are also continuously reflected upon and evaluated.
Below are some excerpts from a fourth grader’s data notebook, showing her metacognition, personal mission statement, and goal-setting strategies.
As students work to reach their goals, they track their progress through written reflections, graphs of scores and personal evaluations, and through student-teacher conferences in which progress is discussed.
Similarly, students regularly self-reflect during and after STEM challenges or integrated design problems. Evaluations and reflections are focused on whether or not solutions or products meet criteria for success, as well as students’ own performance in collaboration and problem-solving goals. Below are examples of such reflections completed for a kindergarten challenge.
Our annual school-wide Engineering Fair, which took place this year on January 29th,is another way that students clearly personalize and self-direct their STEM learning experiences. After having opportunities and experiences with the Engineering Design Process and problem-solving challenges in multiple settings over the past few years, our faculty decided to shift the focus of our Science Fair to an engineering-based competition. Students were offered suggestions of problems to solve (for which they developed and tested personalized solutions), or had the option of discovering their own problems to solve.
Students showed a great degree of creativity and resilience in developing their own solutions to chosen problems, both collaboratively and independently. Many fifth graders chose to confront the challenge of collecting rainwater for survival of organisms in a given habitat. A wide variety of solutions to this problem was developed, tested, improved, and presented, and students were able to learn from their own experiences and those of others. The challenge was left open-ended, and other students chose alternate problems to solve, such as engineering energy-efficient windows, designing shoes for walking through wetlands efficiently, or developing ways to keep plants watered in various environments. |
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In addition to open-ended problems presented to students as independent investigations, grade levels also provide opportunities for students to direct their own learning in inquiry-based projects and challenges. One such example is a “Schoolyard Habitat” project, which is an ongoing design challenge that encourages students to enhance the school’s campus by encouraging and protecting wildlife in the area. Students formulated the focus question regarding wildlife, as well as researched and proposed their own solutions to attracting wildlife to the school grounds. Each class has developed a slightly different approach, and the goal will be to synergize the various ideas into one practical solution that will accomplish the overall objective. Below is a photograph of students partaking in the first research steps of the process, in which they identified missing attributes of the school’s campus as a means of pinpointing the focus of the project, as well as a digital map made by students while planning the ideal location for their planned garden.