STEM Educators 1.6

ST1.6 The interdisciplinary problem-based curriculum includes a focus on real world applications.

At Munford High School educators have a very specific approach for creating an interdisciplinary, problem-based curriculum. Teachers from all content areas collaborate as a team to create meaningful STEM lessons that will ensure that our students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems. Our teachers strive to make sure that our lessons are student-centered with a focus on collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity.

Through various STEM meetings and the Google Classroom platform, we offer several professional development opportunities to increase teachers' planning and collaboration skills. We utilize all that Google has to offer, whether we are sharing documents through the use of Google Drive or whether we are using Google Slides to create an interdisciplinary STEM lesson that spans across multiple content areas.

Our faculty is continually planning our curriculum with “the end in mind” to determine how students will apply what they have learned to real-world scenarios. Learning targets are used throughout the school to ensure that students have a complete understanding of the outcome of a lesson. Essential questions are used to drive our projects. Teachers work together to create authentic, problem-based scenarios while keeping the lesson both engaging and student friendly.

We strive to incorporate STEM lessons into every content area, not just in math and science classes. Faculty members are constantly reaching out to one another to bridge the interdisciplinary gap, so our students are able to recognize that disciplines are fluid and connections can be made within all areas of study. Utilizing STEM curricula with our students allows educators to be creative with lesson planning while maintaining the implementation of our state standards.

Teachers in all content areas collaborate to create rubrics for our Digital Portfolio Presentations and Student-Led Conferences. Our faculty guides and helps students while they navigate through an interview process with family and faculty members while learning real-world skills. Our educators encourage our students to take ownership of the skills and strategies they have learned throughout the year. The digital portfolio platform allows our teachers to develop meaningful lessons where students are able to practice their public speaking skills in order to prepare them for college and the workplace.

Our science department collaborates with professors from Jacksonville State University to create a valuable opportunity for our students to showcase their STEM skills in a symposium hosted by the university. Throughout the year, teachers lead students as they collaborate with each other and conduct various research projects and experiments using Zebrafish as a research model. The STEM lessons that our faculty members create allow students to become actual scientific researchers. The students present their findings to a panel that consists of professors, current university students, and community stakeholders. The panel, as well as instructors, collaborate to give invaluable feedback that our students can implement in their future endeavors.

Teachers in our anatomy and video production classes collaborate with each other in order to create opportunities for our students to produce educational media productions full of content and creativity. STEM skills are implemented as students apply the content and skills that they acquire in both classes to create meaningful projects such as the production of a musical video expressing the various ways in which the bones in our human body work cohesively. These teachers foster an amazing learning environment that encourages students to use their own ingenuity and creativity to guide their learning while keeping lessons aligned with our state standards.

We strive to give our students the best education imaginable, and through our STEM lessons we are able to create and promote an environment where the leaders of tomorrow are able to thrive. By creating lessons with real-world applications, we are preparing our students to become successful members of society who are able to utilize the skills they learn at Munford High School in their lives beyond school. It is our plan to continue to develop STEM lessons that will continue to help students prepare for their future endeavors in any college or career program. It is our hope that our students will be able to use these 21st Century skills and strategies that they learn in order to achieve success throughout their life.

During the Zimbabwe PBL, students learned alternative ways to make bricks. They created several prototypes made of recycled paper, sand, concrete, and perlite. They measured the durability of the different ratios and created their own version of a Rocket Stove.

Our Career Technical Education (CTE) program at Munford High School provides our students with a wide range of academic and technical skills, supplies the knowledge and training necessary to succeed in future careers, and encourages students to become lifelong learners. Throughout our CTE program students are encouraged to think about problems that they might face in the real-world and to generate solutions to those problems. Additionally, the problems that students are asked to solve in their core content classes transfer over to their career-tech courses.

For example, in the first video, chemistry and agriscience students were asked the following question: How can we combat the growing world population with a sustainable food resource in an urban environment? In their chemistry classes students created prototypes of a solar powered greenhouse and aquaponics system. After testing all of the prototypes, students selected one prototype which was then built in the agriscience class. Through this interdisciplinary problem-based curriculum, students were able to provide real-world solutions to a 21st Century problem.

In the second video, AP Computer Science students learn to send binary messages by participating in an unplugged activity. Students created and demonstrated a device for sending a single bit of information over a distance (i.e. yes or no answer). Students then modified the device to send messages with more than two states (i.e. more than a yes or no answer). This allowed students to understand, from an engineering perspective, the simplest way to physically send messages over a distance. The second video depicts students programming Sphero robotic balls to accomplish a specific task.