Ed. Note: During the summer the SMT Center will distribute follow up stories written around the themes presented at the Science Summit.
Today, our fiercest economic competitors are India and China — but who might they be in a decade? Would you guess Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, and Panama?
Gasps resonated through the 350-plus crowd when keynote speaker Bill Daggett, president of the International Center for Leadership in Education, revealed this prediction at the second-annual Science Summit on April 19 in Cary, N.C It was not the only sobering fact dished out about America’s slide in K-12 STEM education on the global stage, but it left an impression.
“Multiple nations are beginning to pass us. The American Business Roundtable is scared to death of this information,” Daggett said, connecting the dots between global economic trends, forecasted STEM and knowledge job demands, and K-12 science and mathematics classes in your hometown. “The need to adapt our teaching strategies has never been more urgent.”
The diverse talks that followed Daggett’s opening address sought to answer two questions: How do we catch up? And how do we prepare our kids for an unknown future?
“Change happening outside of schools is occurring at a rate four to five times faster than the rate of change within schools,” Daggett said. “This is our problem.” And implementing deep changes in education — to keep pace with rapidly evolving and converging forces of globalization, demography and technology — is not likely to come from tinkering around the edges, he said.
Summit presenters emphasized this theme plus three crucial components for the road map to improving STEM education:
The need for students to think critically and apply knowledge in unpredictable situations
The need for schools to invest in continuous professional development for teachers
The need to integrate current data-finding and communication technologies with all teaching modalities
Many strong case studies, strategies and ideas were discussed, and most did not look like the lessons you may remember from your own childhood. This is a good sign because, as Daggett pointed out, our schools have been preparing kids for what we knew in the past, not for what they need to know in their future. And figuring out how to get from the present to a better and more secure future, in the least amount of time, is the crux of our STEM education conundrum.
A handful of strategies presented included: partnering businesses and scientists with schools, reducing federally-mandated standards, integrating science and math curriculum content, planning inquiry-based learning methods, looping teachers across several grades, awarding credit for student internships outside of school, using new tools to assess learning, dissecting components of schools that excel, sustaining disruptive innovation and identifying factors that resist change.
“Educators need to become agents of change. They need to become drivers of public policy,” said Ray McNulty, ICLE vice-president, stating that reform will likely need to originate bottom-up from within schools.
Most teachers and educators who attended the Summit likely felt empowered to impart seeds of change in their own districts upon returning home. And they should have fertile proving grounds, according to former N.C. governor James B. Hunt, Jr.
“There is a built-in constituency for teachers out there to cultivate STEM,” Hunt said in his address. “Surveys show that 62 percent of kids think biology is necessary, and that math connects to real life problems.”
Now that is an excellent starting point, and a precious resource to nurture.
