Curriculum & content

2) Students anchor their learning to foundational STEM DISCIPLINARY ideas. 

Students understand the foundational disciplinary ideas essential to course topics.

• Big Ideas Resources, iTeachU, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Resources for identifying and using foundational disciplinary ideas in courses, using ideas related to Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.

• Read Implementing “Big Ideas” to Advance the Teaching and Learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Article provides a six-component framework to scaffold instructors’ development of STEM units based on big ideas.

• Big Ideas Folder has resources developed through previous grant work.

Highly structured learning experiences across time support students’ progressive understanding of the course’s foundational disciplinary ideas.

• Be transparent about what the big ideas are; unpack big ideas and elicit student questions about them.

• Group or color code assignments/activities in syllabus by their associated STEM disciplinary idea.

• The Tyranny of Content: "Content Coverage" as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It 2020 paper that identifies strategies instructors can use to move to more student-centered approaches to teaching.

Students have structured opportunities to connect what they are learning to the course's foundational disciplinary ideas.

• Use exit ticket/survey to ask students to explain how a big idea relates to the current classroom activity.