WHAT COUNTS?
Educators are called upon to be experts in their fields. Every day they balance professional duties with academic demand from their "audience". In order for a STEM teacher to be successful, he or she must know and understand:
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-A broad range of STEM academic content
-MSDE STEM Standards of Practice
-AES 21st Century Skills
-The modern learner as a product of multiple "spheres of influence"
-Modern technology as an asset to the teaching profession
-Child and adolescent brain development
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A successful 21st century STEM teacher has an advanced knowledge of his or her students, beginning with a strong grasp of their spheres of influence and child/adolescent brain development and how these affect classroom performance. These forms of content knowledge are undervalued and underrepresented in the typical education conversation. They are not unique to the STEM classroom and yet they are vitally important for the teacher to assign tasks that are relevant to the students, assignments they intrinsically care about and are motivated by. To be a good teacher, one must have strong content knowledge in who their students are socially and mentally.
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A STEM classroom is inherently integrative. A successful teacher will recognize this and present tasks that blend the disciplines, similar to real life learning opportunities, and by doing so, emphasize a skills-based curriculum. Yes, it is crucial that a STEM teacher know and understand science standards, technology standards, engineering standards, and math standards. Yes it is also critical that STEM teachers understand the intersections of those content areas and use them within lessons and projects to emphasize learning across disciplines. The way that a teacher does this is through the STEM Standards of Practice and 21st Century Skills. STEM students will be expected to master a 21st century world and would begin to do so in a successful modern STEM class. Naturally, a teacher's understanding of the role of technology in the modern classroom is also critical because he or she must not only be able to implement technology for the sake of teaching, but must also be able to guide and inform students' use of digital tools.
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The field of STEM is rapidly progressing and it will be fascinating to continue to observe its evolution over the course of a career. I look forward to revisiting this analysis one day and being able to see how things have changed or not changed over time.
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