Education in North Carolina is at a crossroads. The shift in the state’s economy from one driven largely by low-skilled labor to one shaped by the know-how of a well-educated workforce is creating a golden opportunity for tremendous change in what and how we teach our children.
Students must now complete high school ready for almost anything and with an agility to adapt to a fast changing world. Knowing things is still important, but the “to do” is now indispensible.
Which is why STEM education is so crucial to North Carolina’s youth and their future. Schools that are creating new approaches that integrate science, technology, engineering and math aim to graduate students able to think for themselves and to help solve problems for their communities and the world. Consider that STEM can also stand more broadly for Strategies That Engage Minds - approaches to powerful teaching and learning that can excite and challenge students with relevant issues, projects that require thought and collaboration and the demonstration of skills. That’s the kind of education that provides students with something that has real shelf life.
Ten years ago, the N.C. Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Center (SMT) was launched to promote stronger instruction and achievement in those fields across the state. Since then, a number of innovative high schools with a STEM focus, many with support from the North Carolina New Schools Project, have opened across the state. Many of them are proving successful. Now, the SMT has joined with the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, the University of North Carolina and the N.C. Community College System under the newly created N.C. STEM Learning Network to coordinate the state’s efforts to make high-quality STEM education available in more communities and to more students.
The STEM Learning Network will help guide the implementation of a statewide strategic plan to better coordinate STEM initiatives with a goal of increasing student achievement, community involvement, and corporate support for STEM education.
The network is taking a four-pronged approach to expanding and deepening the reach of STEM education across the state: developing a scorecard to measure progress based on a number of indicators, ranging from test scores to numbers of engineering degrees conferred; promoting STEM education with a public awareness campaign; creating a comprehensive web portal with resources for educators, businesses and parents; and helping to support the state’s growing networks of STEM-focused schools.
Schools like those that the North Carolina New Schools Project is helping develop are already showing how instruction can be changed in our classrooms. NCNSP should be applauded for making powerful teaching and learning the real focus of education innovation. Students need to be given more responsibility for their own learning. The emphasis must be more on thinking, communicating and problem solving; less on the memorization of facts. Schools must find ways that allow students to channel their creativity and to put them in frequent confrontation with the unknown and the uncomfortable. That’s where real learning happens.
Key to all of this, of course, are teachers who challenge and provoke while they support and guide. An exciting, engaging STEM classroom would have a teacher who is skilled at answering a question with a better question. They would expect multiple performances that would demonstrate that students really understand the content, rather than just a snapshot. They would always be thinking about how to connect their instruction to things happening in the community and world. They’d give their students lots of opportunities to demonstrate that they can think, rather than just have the right answer.
This is the kind of powerful and teaching and learning that all students in North Carolina need to be well prepared when they graduate. There’s never been a better time to make it happen.
