I had a wonderful chat recently about strategies for planning curriculum with teachers that maintains student and teacher autonomy and agency, while still having structure and a clear learning trajectory. After being the STEM teacher and establishing a program over several years, Tiffany is now in a coordinator role and was trying to figure out how to best set up her new teacher for success. He is enthusiastic and excited about robotics, and she wanted to capitalize on that, and on the great engagement she sees in his classes, while bringing in some structure for sustainability.
Together we talked about how using an IQ STEM Lab like Team Freeze Tag can give teachers and students a larger scale project to dig into, while giving them the autonomy to make choices about their robot, while building collaboration skills and supporting engineering notebook habits. The continual hands-on practice and small competitions plays into student-teacher excitement, and gives little milestone moments they can celebrate together, while still engaging in pursuing larger-scale learning goals.
We also talked about how she could help her mentee-teacher find IQ Activities, or make his own, that can supplement the concepts in the STEM Lab and keep things “fresh”, or give a little brain break when needed. While she loved working on longer-term projects, sometimes teachers need some little break days in the midst of those to keep things engaging for everyone.
We also talked about strategies for supporting new teachers in helping to draw out the things that they think are going well in class, and helping them identify the things they think students are trying to figure out as part of a conversation to shape curriculum together. It was a great talk, and I look forward to our next 1-on-1!
