WHAT IS STEAM?

STEAM refers to science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics. STEAM education encourages students to explore and solve real-life problems, thus enhancing their logical thinking, creativity, teamwork skills, and more. Uncover all you need to know about STEAM education, with analysis from case studies, stories by STEAM teachers worldwide.

What does STEAM stand for in education? STEAM education is an approach to teaching and learning that integrates science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math as pathways to guide student inquiry, discussions, and critical thinking. Education experts say STEAM education helps students develop the capacity to:

Take thoughtful risks
Engage in meaningful learning activities
Become resilient problem solvers
Embrace and appreciate collaboration
Work through the creative process

STEAM education allows students to probe thought-provoking questions—the types of questions with answers you can’t just search for online. STEAM is an approach to education that empowers students to be curious learners who seek creative solutions to real-world problems; this helps them develop the soft and hard skills necessary to succeed in college, their careers, and wherever else life takes them.

Education experts say that although science training provides a solid foundation of facts and basic science techniques, it doesn’t do a great job of examining how scientists foster creative and cross-disciplinary problem-solving skills. By allowing students to master the art of creative problem-solving, students learn how to preserve in the face of ambiguity and the obstacles it presents.

In fact, research shows that students who participate in creative programs display:

Advanced thinking
The know-how to cope with stress
Enhanced self-awareness
Social skills like teamwork, communication, confidence, autonomy, and motivation
The ability to build connections with their community

That’s why the “A” in STEAM is so vital. Integrating the arts into STEM allows students to master the skills mentioned above, which supports their ability to succeed in the future. It also allows students not only to engage with their learning but also supports them in recalling and retaining the information they learned.

How to Use STEAM: Process and Product

There are actually 6 steps to creating a STEAM-Centered classroom, no matter what area you teach. In each step, you’re working through both the content and the arts standards to address a central problem or essential question.

What’s great about this process is that you can as easily use it to help plan for a lesson as you can to facilitate the actual learning process in your STEAM classroom. Let’s take a look at each step.

1. Focus
In this step, we’re selecting an essential question to answer or problem to solve. It’s important to have a clear focus on both how this question or problem relates to the STEM and the Arts content areas you’ve chosen.

2. Detail
During the detail phase, you’re looking for the elements that are contributing to the problem or question. When you’re observing the correlations to other areas or why the problem exists, you begin to unearth a lot of key background information, skills or processes that students already have to address the question.

3. Discovery
Discovery is all about active research and intentional teaching. In this step, students are researching current solutions, as well as what ISN’T working based on the solutions that already exist. As a teacher, you can use this stage to both analyze the gaps your students may have in a skill or process and to teach those skills or processes explicitly.

4. Application
This is where the fun happens! After students have dived deep into a problem or question and have analyzed current solutions as well as what still needs addressed, they can begin to create their own solution or composition to the problem. This is where they use the skills, processes and knowledge that were taught in the discovery stage and put them to work.

5. Presentation
Once students have created their solution or composition, it’s time to share it. It’s important that the work is presented for feedback and as a way for expression based on a student’s own perspective surrounding the question or problem at hand. This is also an important opportunity to facilitate feedback and help students learn how to give and receive input.

6. Link
This step is what closes the loop. Students have a chance to reflect on the feedback that was shared and on their own process and skills. Based on that reflection, students are able to revise their work as needed and to produce an even better solution.

Source: https://www.mblock.cc/en-us/blog/category/steam-education/

https://xqsuperschool.org/rethinktogether/what-is-steam-education/

https://artsintegration.com/what-is-steam-education-in-k-12-schools/#steamprocess

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