STEM and Equity in the Burlington School District

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

― Albert Einstein

Recently, a budget draft included funding of a STEM position at Flynn Elementary. Here is why adding and/or strengthening STEM education at Flynn and in all Burlington schools is the right thing to do.

STEM is cutting edge education.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. At its best STEM education consists of hands-on, student-centered design challenges and project-based learning that cultivates the imagination.

Einstein’s remarks about the importance of imagination have never been more apt.

The world is changing so rapidly that no one can anticipate what, specifically, students will need to know. We must equip them for success in a in a technology-driven world that demands continual learning. Students should be offered broad and varied opportunities to take charge of their own education, collaborate, communicate, design and synthesize.

STEM is diversity and equity.

Quality STEM education is enemy of the achievement gap. Women and people of color are still underrepresented in STEM classes in high schools, STEM majors in college, and STEM fields in the workforce. Women and people of color are equally capable of excelling in this work and they provide much-needed perspectives. We have to ask why the demographics of these fields continue to be skewed. The fact is that we still live in a world full of biases and systemic discrimination. Education is a critical part of the solution. Stereotypes, biases and barriers don’t go away without concerted effort to counteract them.

The importance of high quality STEM education goes beyond giving students opportunities in STEM fields. It makes school a place where more students are able to be successful, period. Hands-on, student-centered design challenges, a hallmark of STEM, tend to work better for all students than traditional pedagogy. Students who are from low income families, are non-white, are new Americans and/or English language learners are at greater risk for under performance in school. STEM helps these students. Education for equity means providing engaging, challenging work for all students.

As a K-5 Math Coach in the Burlington School District, I have personally witnessed the power of STEM education. Individuals who are less successful in traditional learning situations shine when engaged in high quality STEM learning opportunities. I’ve watched students who typically exhibit challenging behaviors and low academic performance become energized about computer programming, exploring fractals in art and nature, catapult building, geodesic dome construction, and on and on. It is hard not to become an advocate of this type of education after watching marginalized students get opportunities to demonstrate their brilliance.

STEM is for Burlington

It is wise to fund STEM education in Burlington. By investing in STEM, we are focusing on what really works for achievement and equity. This is a forward-thinking opportunity to empower our students to be the leaders, thinkers, and makers of a changing world. Imagine that.

Geodesic Dome Building, Part I

Ada Leaphart, Integrated Arts Academy Art Teacher Extraordinaire, and I have embarked on an adventure. We’ve got all the fourth graders at IAA building geodesic domes out of newspaper.

I really don’t know how this is going to end up, so that is why I have named this Part I. I hope to report back with more news as the project progresses.

Ada and I decided to keep things loose. We didn’t want to figure everything out for the students by creating our own dome first, learning all the lessons, and then presenting a tidy scenario.

Instead, we have never attempted to create a geodesic dome out of newspaper or anything else, for that matter. Sometimes STEM+Art (I, unlike others, am not wanting to call that STEAM) should be messy and students should have the fun of making mistakes and doing all the figuring.

Before the students got started building, Ada showed a photo of a geodesic dome and asked students what they noticed. We got some math+art conversation going from that, as students noticed many geometric shapes, like triangles, pentagons, hexagons, and trapezoids. Then we talked about old Bucky Fuller (every class asked if he was still living) and how he really wanted to make the world a better place for everyone by using an efficient structure like a dome for shelter.

Kids couldn’t wait to get started. Here are the instructions we are using from PBS.

It turns out, you can roll newspaper in a loose, floppy, weak way or you can roll it in a very tight, very strong roll. Students shared successful and unsuccessful techniques. Among the successful techniques invented by students are 1) Asking someone else to help you tape the roll, 2) asking someone else for help, period, 3) twisting the roll when it is finished to make it even tighter, and 4) using a pencil to act as the center of the roll, then shaking it loose once the roll is finished.

We ended up with enough rolls to make one or two domes. 65 usable rolls are needed. Next time we will need to establish a Quality Control group to assess, select, and count the rolls we’ve got. Ada and I aren’t sure how the whole thing is going to go. At the end of it all I would like to set the dome on fire in the playground. I am not sure we will get permission for that. Oh well, we’re going to roll with it.

Vermont Fest 2014 and a Snake

The sign of a good conference is when you come away from it questioning everything about your work.

I like this snake drawing from the New York Public Library more than the three terrible photos I took of people in banquet rooms at the Killington Grand. I would never consider publishing a blog post without a picture.

At Vermont Fest this year, I found myself wanting to make a list of a bunch of things all students should get the chance to do in school.

Skype/hangout/video interact with people in other parts of the world

Type an equal sign into a spreadsheet

Make a personalized, LED-lit badge to explore how light works

Have maker/genius/whatever hour/day/week to explore something interesting to them

Publish their content (writing/photos/videos) on a blog and comment on the work of others

Learn about how computers work by writing some code

Be asked the questions How are you feeling? What do you think? and What do you need?

Use Google Research Tools to find and cite things.

Sit in chairs listening to a teacher talk a lot less.

Some great presenters I encountered include Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann), Bonnie Birdsall (@bonniebird), Dan French (@danfrench), Adam Provost (@batman44), Lucie deLaBruere (@techsavvygirl), Charlie Macfadyen (@csmacf), Tricia Hinkle (@VTScienceFair), Matt Dunne (@@mattdunnevt). Check them out.

Here are a couple of links.

Using Google Sheets in the Classroom

Tricia Hinkle’s site

Bonnie Birdsall’s writing tech site

The Vermont Fest site with all kinds of other links to presenters

Through the eyes of a student

Asbury Park High School, NJ, where my father used to teach.

I am excited about this article on Grant Wiggins’ blog entitled, A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned.

The first sentence is “I have made a terrible mistake.”

The reason the author made this statement is that shadowing students for a few days was an eye-opening experience. Her regret is that she didn’t do this early in her teaching career.

“...I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!”

This article is a heartbreaking read. Typical students at this high school sit passively in their classes for almost the entire day, an activity that left the author feeling “drained” and “icky”. Doing any kind of homework felt impossible.

“I was so tired by the end of the day, I wasn’t absorbing most of the content, so I am not sure my previous method of making kids sit through hour-long, sit-down discussions of the texts was all that effective.”

Gosh. More educators should shadow students for a few days.

Fibonacci and Fractals Links

I had the pleasure of being the co-presenter of a workshop called “Fibonacci, Fractals, and the Common Core Math Standards” at the VCTM conference at Saint Michael’s College on Friday. My partners were Professor Tim Whiteford of Saint Michael’s College and Laura Sommariva, a math teacher at Colchester High School.

The three of us shared what we’d done with students during a fifth grade field trip to Tim’s famous Penny Arcade. Here is Tim’s original write-up about that.

As promised, for the participants in our workshop and others, here are the resources we used to teach about fractals and Fibonacci numbers.

The Fractal Foundation Fractivities. How to draw Sierpinski triangles, do fractal cutouts and more.

Worksheetworks. Create your own graph paper and triangle paper.

On Being a Plant, Part 1, the 6 minute Vi Hart video we watched. She explains Fibonacci numbers, and demonstrates how to count the spirals on pinecones, draw realistic pinecones, and use graph paper to make a golden spiral.

Laura teaches summer math classes for elementary students in Switzerland. She has photos of her students here doing wonderful, related activities like building giant tetrahedrons out of mini marshmallows.

Have fun!

Shelburne Farms Mini Maker Faire

I went to the Maker Faire at Shelburne Farms today for the first time.

This is what I did.

I made a magic wand with an LED light that turns on and off by touching a wire to a battery on the wand. I first had to figure out how to connect the LED to some wires, then run them to the battery correctly. After that part was working, I added sparkly silver ribbon to the stem of the wand and encased the LED light in crumply clear plastic tape for light refraction purposes. Voila! I am ready to put spells on people. Joanna Elliott, Flynn Elementary parent and teacher, was the wizard behind this project. See her fabulous art blog.

I made a puzzle book, a square flexagon (a previously unknown-to-me relative of the hexaflexagon) for comic-book type story-telling, and a mini book that could contain anything from math facts to the secrets of the universe. A matchbook size mini book can be made and then kept in an actual matchbox. Book Arts Guild of Vermont people helped me do this. Students might want to make these after reading the Red Clover Book entitled The Matchbox Diary by Paul Fleischman. This is an activity for any budget.

I spoke with Richa, who is going to assist with a course called Intro to Relational Databases at Girl Develop It Burlington. There are classes and meet-ups. I want to go.

Champlain College Emergent Media Center folks explained what they are working on. Their new Maker Lab that had its grand opening party last night.

I saw a robot-building challenge and presentation by Joe Chase and his team of students from Essex High School. Joe is my neighbor and it was great to see him up there advocating for more design and engineering work in schools. My daughter took his robotics class a few years ago and loved it.

I saw and did many other cool things, including experimenting with magnets with Frank White from CreateItLab and speaking with the effervescent Michael Metz of Generator, Lucy deLaBruere, Courtney Asaro, and Graham Clarke, both of Flynn Elementary School in Burlington.

What a great day! Takeaways included an Arduino Robot Kit made by YourDuino.com and the knowledge that so many people are working on creating engaging opportunities for people of all ages in the Burlington area.

Keep the Mystery

A few years ago, my husband told me he thought he saw a wolf running across our dirt road. At the time I said no, but maybe he was right. The creature he could have seen is a so-called coywolf, a coyote+wolf+dog that has allegedly established itself in the forests and neighborhoods of New England.

Yesterday, I was reading about the coywolf in the New York Times and was reminded of the incredible nuance, mystery, and ambiguity of the study of genetics and evolution. “Should You Fear the Pizzly Bear?” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff is an article about the effects of climate change on speciation.

“The dirty secret of biology is that the fundamental unit of science - i.e. species - in fact can’t be adequately defined,” said a Monterey Bay Aquarium scientist.

Even Charles Darwin saw the difficulty in the notion of species. From the Velasuez-Manoff article, “...[Darwin] was vague on how to define species, referring to ‘the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term.’”

As a child and then a teenager in school, science was presented as something that was unambiguous, and something that smart scientists in labs somewhere were doing with precision and finality. I was shocked when I began studying evolutionary biology in college. The taxonomic system of classification, a construct created by humans, prompted more questions than answers, its tree model seeming too simplistic to adequately explain the breadth and nuance of life on Earth.

Science became interesting to me at that point. I realized that everything wasn’t figured out already and people like me could join the conversation.

My learning about epigenetics in college caused me to question some of what I’d been taught about genes and heredity. Today, there is growing evidence and acceptance of the idea that traits can be inherited that are not written in one’s actual DNA. This directly contradicts what I was taught in high school biology.

As an educator who creates or curates units and lesson plans, often the temptation is to simplify things for students (and teachers). Another temptation is to rely on knowledge of a subject from my own (increasingly distant) school days. Do we present science in all its bizarre, unknowable complexity? How can teachers challenge even young students with unanswerable questions?

Summer Gems

Here are two articles you shouldn’t miss this summer, and they make a nice pair.

“Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” by Elizabeth Green, July 23, New York Times, and “Most Math Problems Do Not Have a Unique Right Answer” by Keith Devlin, August 1, 2014, Devlin’s Angle.

I’ve come to the conclusion that our old ideas and stereotypes about math and education are hard to shake. It really means reading articles like these as they come out every month or so, in order to truly change our minds and our practice.

To whet your appetite, here are a few quotes:

One of the first math classes he observed gave him such a jolt that he assumed there must have been some kind of mistake. The class looked exactly like his own memories of school. “I thought, Well, that’s only this class,” Takahashi said. But the next class looked like the first, and so did the next and the one after that. The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them. - from “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?”

Having earned my living as a mathematician for over 40 years, I can assure you that the belief is false. In addition to my university research, I have done mathematical work for the U. S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Army, private defense contractors, and a number of for-profit companies. In not one of those projects was I paid to find "the right answer." No one thought for one moment that there could be such a thing. - from “Most Math Problems Do Not Have a Unique Right Answer”

The last summer gem is this youcubed video about using Number Talks in math class. How would you solve 18 x 5 mentally?