Make future teachers comfortable using and teaching with STEAM tools

Key points:

In my third-year fall class “STEM in Early Childhood,” I noticed a common trend: the preservice teachers, who were all women, shared the stereotypical belief that they were not math or science people and therefore They were not equipped to teach. STEAM. I normally assign a 20-page capstone project in my STEM course, but I decided to take a more fun and hands-on approach for this group of students. My motivation was simple: I wanted to help the class develop confidence in teaching STEAM concepts.

Fortunately, a year earlier, one of my final fourth-year students had prior experience with robotics in high school and was interested in finding a screen-free way to introduce robotics to the Dean College Children's Center. She discovered the BELLY robot, and for his final project he wrote a grant application for the Dean College Innovation Grant. She won the grant, which allowed Dean Children's Center to purchase two KIBO kits and conduct an independent study project focused on implementing the hands-on, screen-free robot with four- and five-year-old children at Dean College's Children's Center. This inspired me to incorporate KIBO into my STEM course for pre-service teachers.

Embrace change with a hands-on approach to STEAM learning

With my usual 20-page final project firmly in the rearview mirror, I instead directed my student teachers to play and explore. When the class expressed doubt, I challenged them by saying, “If three-year-olds can do it, you can do it too.” I recognized that their intimidation came not from the technology itself, but from a lack of trust. By implementing this hands-on approach, I hoped that students would not only deepen their own understanding of STEAM, but also gain the confidence and inspiration to effectively teach these critical subjects to their future students.

To build students' confidence and skills, I began by asking them to program and design the KIBO robots on their own. As the lessons progressed, we explored various uses of KIBO in the classroom. In one lesson, we transformed KIBO into a snow blower by designing a snow blower for the front of the robot and programming it to remove snow (or cotton balls). In another lesson, we used KIBO as a bowling ball to strategically knock down plastic bowling pins. We would conclude each class with an observation/feedback session, allowing student teachers to share their experiences and learn from each other.

Thanks to the Commonwealth Cares for Children Grant (C3) of the Massachusetts Early Childhood Teacher Program, the center was able to purchase the KIBO curriculum and also various accessories for deeper exploration. I had the students review the curriculum written with young learners in mind and find a plan that they thought would work best for the children. The goal of this lesson was not perfection, but rather for my students to learn what works and what doesn't through the lens of young minds, and how to adapt their teaching approach to a given curriculum. I told the class, “The outcome doesn't have to be completely successful. Let's try it and see what happens. We will learn a lot from this!”

Develop skills and confidence

As I expected, the class learned more efficiently and enthusiastically about STEAM topics through this hands-on learning approach than with my standard PowerPoint presentations and lectures. Through their work with KIBO, student teachers discovered that they already had more STEAM skills than they initially thought. Designing their own lessons with KIBO included integrating robotics into a specific topic, incorporating arts and crafts, and developing sequences with KIBO's programmable wooden building blocks, and helped them exceed their own expectations by getting involved with coding, robotics, and other STEAM concepts they had. found it intimidating at the beginning of the semester.

For this class, we focused on introducing robotics to four and five year olds. However, I believe that even younger children are capable of engaging with these STEAM concepts. Investigation has shown that young children's brains are primed for this type of exploratory, hands-on learning. This is a key consideration as I continue to refine my courses for future educators. After a semester of scrapping the syllabus, I was left with an inspiring question: How can I make my future courses more practical while keeping academic writing and academic requirements intact?

Looking to a future full of play

For the next school year, I am incorporating ScratchJr into the curriculum to add additional programming skills and some age-appropriate screen time for five-year-olds. I also plan to add an app called Because? that helps educators take observations, videos and images, connects students to developmental screening information, and facilitates communication between home and school. I'm excited to see how these tools improve the learning process.

My parting advice to colleagues teaching the next generation of teachers: let them play! Have a good time. Once they enjoy a little bit of what they are doing, you can apply all the pedagogy they need to understand. If you free your future teachers to play, they are likely to do the same with their students. When my class, who did not see themselves as STEAM teachers, had the freedom to play without fear of failure, they were much more eager (and better equipped) to teach those concepts in their future classrooms. By starting with hands-on learning and building trust first, I believe we can transform how the next generation of educators approach teaching STEAM and how future generations of students will also learn these concepts.