As a school community, we are well aware of our vision for learning and how it must drive us towards decisions and actions that are largely based on a combination of what we know makes for good learning combined with what we know about the changing nature of the world.
With the Department’s AdvancingQLD agenda and the moral imperative we have to prepare our students for a world in which STEM skills will empower them to be change-makers, we are keen to take strategic steps towards deciding on a way forward for our context.
Our staff last week spent some time reflecting on our school vision and imagining what our students would look like in 3 or 4 years time if we attained our vision. We brainstormed a list of descriptive terms which we would use to apply to such a student.
This week, when continuing our conversation about STEM@OSS, we used a compiled version of these notes to identify those which of them aligned to STEM learning. One of these posters is displayed below – with the typed descriptions from last week being attached to the upper part of the image. After discussing those which had been left out by some groups we realised that, for other groups, they had included them on their image. These descriptions were those largely related to social and emotional learning or some to ‘whole child’ development – and we discussed that by placing students in situations which were challenging and problem based, we were also giving them opportunity for growth in these social and emotional areas.
We then had time to browse a reading about the alignment between STEM and 21st Century learning attributes. In groups, we added three more that were identified in the article but not necessarily already on our sheet.
At the end of our session, we watched a video aimed at reminding us of the hands-on nature of STEM learning and the exciting potential that exists in each of our young learners: