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At Woodland Forrest, we take a shared leadership approach to the continuous improvement process. Our ACIP is developed yearly in concert with our parents, students, and partners. Their input is necessary in fostering a STEM culture and sustaining STEM initiatives. Using the previous year’s data, the leadership team reviews academic data (science and math), cultural data (student interest surveys and teacher efficacy surveys), status of partnerships, and parental involvement numbers. We analyze our strengths and build off of those to further promote our STEM culture. We use our areas of need to create our next set of STEM goals. Each year, we task our teachers and stakeholders with completing an evaluation on our current status based on the Cognia STEM Framework to give us data points in major STEM “indicators,” such as engagement, implementation, results, sustainability, and embeddedness. Our STEM team analyzes the results in relation to our established STEM vision to determine our next steps to achieving our STEM goals.
A STEM coordinator is a prime example of strategically allocating resources to help us achieve these goals. This is a budgeted teaching unit, which means one less classroom, but the STEM coordinator can have a large impact if ubiquitous in the planning and execution of STEM activities. Our STEM coordinator does not work in a silo; rather, she networks and connects with teachers to ensure that all teachers are STEM teachers. As a Title I school, we are not awash in funding; so, we must be very intentional in how we allocate resources. As we design our annual budget we prioritize the materials necessary to achieve our STEM goals. When we think about classroom resources at Woodland Forrest, we view them through a STEM lens so that tools, engineering materials, and digital platforms are considered in our planning. We typically supply a classroom for the year. Throughout the year, our STEM committee routinely meets to analyze our budget, needs, and progress towards our goals. We have also become adept at writing grants to fulfill emergent needs. When additional funds, such as state allocations, are released we, once again, look to our STEM program to fill holes or enhance ongoing STEM units. However, we would be naïve to think that full implementation of the STEM program would be possible without the help and support of our partners. It is through the universities and local businesses that we have been able to fund our after-school STEM program, field trips, professional development, and STEM events.
Teacher Reflections
A major part of the continuous improvement process is teacher reflection. Teacher reflection allows us to know where we’ve been and where we need to go. Woodland Forrest teachers reflect daily but at the beginning, middle, and end of each year we ask teachers to formally reflect. During the mid-year reflection, teachers told us that they felt good about their STEM integration in content areas during the first semester. We also learned that teachers wanted to improve in how we integrate STEM in reading and math centers and how to more seamlessly integrate multiple subjects with STEM. Based on this feedback, we created choice boards that enabled teachers to incorporate robotics and coding with reading and math. We also set up days this summer where grade levels can meet with the STEM coordinator, math coach, tech coach, librarian, and admin to continue to develop our thematic units so that subjects are more seamlessly integrated with STEM skills and allow for performance-based assessments.
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Number Talks
Through observation of student data, it became evident to our MSIT team that students needed to build a stronger foundation with number sense. An important practice to improve number sense is to implement daily number talks. This is a practice that was being implemented in some rooms but not all. To combat this, our team immediately surveyed teachers to find out their comfort level and knowledge in regards to number talks. From there, our team put together PD for teachers to learn more about number talks, modeled number talks, observed and annotated number talks, and debriefed with teachers about their number talks. Additionally, our team advocated to AMSTI and TCS for more resources for teachers to use to implement number talks. The district agreed that number talks could significantly improve student learning and purchased previously piloted number talk kits for each teacher. With this level of support, all teachers now implement number talks and our math data is reflecting that shift in practice.
Leadership Meetings
In order for continuous improvement to take place, the STEM leadership team must listen to all stakeholders and then meet to discuss how improvements can be made. The Woodland Forrest leadership team met and continues to formally meet biweekly on Fridays. During the meetings, we discuss how what is happening across grade levels relates to our STEM goals. As a team, we determine how we can continue to support teachers in reaching those STEM goals and what resources might be needed to reach those goals. Specifically, we realized that many teachers did not know what materials were available to them for lesson and project implementation. For this reason, we made a robotics flier and implementation guide, as well as gave teachers access to the STEM closet for any building materials and basic math and science manipulatives that they might need. Through the development of our STEM program, we learned that continuous improvement happens at WF when all stakeholders' needs are being considered in relation to our STEM goals.
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