Are you a teacher who is very passionate about STEM and wants to incorporate it in their classrooms? That's great! But it may not be as easy as you think to make students share your enthusiasm.
Ways To Get Students Excited About STEM
Teachers should try different strategies to make sure their students are excited about stem as much as they are.
It will take a lot of strategy to make sure that your students enjoy STEM and are super excited about it. Here are the best strategies you can use:
Planning
The first thing to do when trying to incorporate the STEM system into your curriculum is to plan it. Like all teachers come up with lesson plans to deliver the knowledge to students, in the same way, they must come up with different plans they can use to introduce and teach STEM to their students.
However, STEM planning is a lot different than normal lesson plans, here are some characteristics you can keep in mind when planning:
More Experimental Than Theoretical
STEM learning is more hands-on than traditional education and this is why it is best for you to plan as many activities and experiments as you can. This will keep your students feel more engaged as they will have to perform these experiments on their own. Do not plan your teaching around lectures, make them more experimental.
Engineering Design Process
It is important for students to learn to think about problems in a systematic way but to ensure that teachers need to use the engineering design process in their planning. You need to ask your students to first define the problem, conduct research, and then discuss all the possible ways they can solve these problems.
These steps can be boring for students but if you are creative, you can plan them in interesting ways and make sure that students enjoy solving problems this way.
Collaborative Work
Working with your peers is always fun. STEM gives you a lot of opportunities to come up with different projects where your students can work in teams. Working in teams is great for teaching your children about collaboration, but it is also important for you to keep them engaged.
Build Up Anticipation With Your Students
Students need to be excited about what they are going to learn with you, which is why it is important that you build anticipation amongst your students. There are several ways that you can do it. For instance, one of the most prominent features of STEM learning is that students can put their education to practice and use it in their professional and personal lives in the future.
Keeping that in mind, you can arrange a meeting with role models as well. Each child in your class must have someone that they look up to, and it would mean the world to them if you were able to make them meet their role models.
There are many ways that you can go about it. If a physical meeting is not possible, you can also request the role model to make a video appearance and talk to your class. This appearance will make your students very excited to learn more about their role model and their line of work.
Add Healthy Challenges
Things always get better when there is a bit of a challenge involved. Moreover, children are very competitive, so you can use that to your advantage by introducing healthy competition in your activities. They will always live up to the challenge and work hard to come up with creative ways to win and become better at the activity.
Combine With Online Resources
There are many different websites that can give the best resources you can use in the planning of your STEM lessons. These resources may include activities, other lectures, and maybe even videos that can be extremely helpful for the STEM learning of your students.
Make sure to surf the internet to find creative resources that can be very helpful in your student's STEM learning.
Share Inspirational Stories From STEM Leaders
There are lots of STEM leaders out there who have made it to the top with the help of STEM learning. Their stories are truly inspirational, and if you share them with your students, they will be more than excited to try the method out themselves.
Try to incorporate as many inspirational stories as possible. This will surely push students to do better and get them excited about STEM.
These strategies are tried and tested; if you make use of them, you will see a significant change in the excitement of students when it comes to STEM lessons. If you are looking for the best STEM curriculum, you can find the top STEM curriculum in Outschool, with over 400 reviews!