School Superintendents of Alabama and Discovery Education held a STEM Conference back in March of 2016. This was the first year as Technology Director, that I didn't have any projects going on during this time (like most Directors, our project are done either Christmas holiday or Spring Break). So I ended up signing up for this conference. It also helped that I SSA was gracious enough to give the participants free tickets to the Alabama and Auburn baseball game at the Montgomery Biscuits stadium.
Here are some of the takeaways I experienced during this conference. First and foremost, the STEM conference had a great guest speaker, being Hakeem Oluseyi. Mr. Oluseyi spoke of his struggles growing up, along with the obstacles he had with education. He was able to get out of his pitfalls and become the renowned astrophysicist, author, and educator that he is today.The presenters at the conference had some interesting numbers when it comes to STEM. The first thing that they mentioned is the fact that Alabama alone has well over 110,000 jobs related to STEM. Majority of these jobs will be given to men because women are not pursuing these particular jobs. This is due to the fact that girls lose interest in Engineering and Technology in high school. STEM jobs are portrayed as a career field for men, instead of women. Movies and TV ads cater these positions to men. Therefore, as young girls are watching these shows, they shy away from these subjects in school. During the STEM Conference, it was encouraged that schools should implement an Hour of Coding into their curriculum. Not only should they implement it, but work harder to encourage young girls to take on these subjects, and master them equally, if not better, than their male peers.
The second session, on day two, spoke on changing the environment and spectrum in a school system, in order to encourage and promote STEM or STEAM. Statistics show, that an individual teacher needs 80 hours of Professional Development over 2 years in order to change their mindset and grow them into a particular curriculum (instantly when this was spoken, I began looking at our teacher averages of PD time in STI-PD). It was given, that in order for a district to change the "culture" of teachers, that each one needed a total of 160 hours of Professional Development within 3 years. Very interesting stats on professional development. Being a technology director, and also one who gives professional development to educators, I began to understand why this is so. The consistency in developing teachers is what changes the culture. Schools that have well established STEM programs did not just wake up one morning and decided to start one. They had careful planning, which a good bit of it included how effective the professional development was going to be with the teachers.
In closing, this was a very good conference. My mind was open on how to continue to bring this to our school system, and work toward the building blocks of starting a program. The conference ended, with the presenters reminding us on building an identity for your school system, your school, or even your classroom.
Websites to check out:
stemconnector
change the equation
discovery education stem
