STEAM Go! and the Center for STEM Education present their research at the recent ASEE New England conference
Associate Academic Specialist Jennifer Love and Center for STEM Education Director Claire Duggan recently published and presented their paper “STEAM Go! A School District’s Approach to Implementing New State Science, Technology & Engineering PreK-12 Curriculum Standards” at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) New England conference at the University of Hartford on April 27, 2018.
Love, a full-time faculty member in the First Year Engineering and Innovation Center in the College of Engineering, along with Duggan and Dr. Ellen Martin, Assistant Superintendent with the Marshfield public schools district in Marshfield, Massachusetts, developed an embedded and sustained teacher professional development program called STEAM Go! to support districts in their efforts to align to the new Massachusetts science, technology and engineering curriculum frameworks, which now requires teachers to teach engineering design beginning in kindergarten. STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. STEAM Go! consisted of several full-day and half-day workshops throughout the 2016 – 2017 school year at 7 Marshfield schools with 131 teachers responsible for teaching science in grades preschool – 12. Love provided continuous curriculum support to teachers in their classrooms, including face-to-face consultations, collaborative curriculum writing initiatives and model teaching events. Research results indicated that teachers unanimously agreed that they need more time to collaborate with their colleagues, more contemporary resources to assist them in delivering content, more time to develop inquiry-based learning (IBL), project-based learning (PBL), and engineering design lessons, and more incentives for taking on leadership roles. Based on the first formal year of implementing STEAM Go! the evidence points to a critical need for qualified and effective STEM, STEAM and engineering education leadership across the state and the country.