Stem and the 4 C's

You’ve probably heard a lot lately about STEM. It’s an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and it’s getting a lot of press because it is becoming more and more clear that jobs in these fields are booming and there are not enough qualified workers to fill them. I read an article in EdWeek recently that had some pretty interesting statistics. For example, STEM fields are expected to grow by 17% over the next decade or so, with other fields growing only 9.8%. Another interesting fact from the article was that nationwide across all employment fields, there are 3.6 people competing for every one job available, in STEM fields there is 1.9 jobs for every one applicant. This is a sector for which we need to be preparing our students. That’s all well and good if your child already has a love for all things math and science, but what if their passions lie in language arts, the humanities or some other area? You shouldn’t feel at all that those areas aren't worthwhile or that STEM can't benefit their development as learners. That’s because the heart of STEM, what employers and colleges really want to see in their students and potential employees, is proficiency in the “four C’s”—curiosity, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. These are the skills that we all should be striving to instill in our students. If we can build our students capacities and proficiencies in these areas, we are giving them the foundations to be great creative thinkers and problems solvers—the next generation of American innovators. It’s never too early to begin placing a focus on these skills—in fact, when kids enter school they are naturally curious, creative collaborators—if you need any evidence of this, walk into any kindergarten class in Albemarle County and you’ll see it pretty quickly. Somewhere along the path to college, these natural tendencies begin to diminish—I think it’s one of our jobs to keep tapping into them and developing them for our kids. Anyway—just some food for thought for today. If you are interested in the article, you can find it at
http://bit.ly/XWszei
Check it out if you get a chance, and spend some time thinking about how we can impact our children's lives for the better with the four C’s.

The Latest Lesson We Loved

Last week the seventh grade math team invited me down to their rooms to check out a lesson they were teaching on proportional reasoning and scale. The first thing I noticed as I approached the rooms was that students were sprawled everywhere in the hallway. Inside the rooms it was no different—groups of students all busily working on a really cool project. For this assignment, students were given a small printout of a picture of a hornet. They divided their picture into several grid squares, and then each member of the group selected squares and copied their portion of the picture using a much larger scale. As each student finished, they pieced their drawings back together and saw that they had, indeed, replicated the original drawing on a much larger scale. This was a great lesson for many reasons—it was highly engaging for the students to be learning a mathematical concept in a different way, it had great tie ins to Marzano’s similarities and differences work, it gave the students a sense of audience as they knew their work would be displayed for the whole class, and it allowed students to work cooperatively with others—if one group member failed to produce, the task could not be completed. It was great to see students working in this way on their math assignments. Great work Melanie, Linda and Andrea!

One Page to Go

I’ve got a printout of the Henley slide schedule tacked to the bulletin board in my office. It takes up three pages to list out the schedule for each day of the school year. This past Tuesday marked a big milestone for the year—the first two pages are done and we’ve got one page of the slide to go this school year. Man does time fly. This year has been a busy one, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. We’ve got four weeks to go until Spring Break, and then things get even faster as we make that final push toward the end of the year. I’m always reminded at this time of year just how important each and every school day is for us and for our kids. We really don’t have any time to waste, especially in a year when we’ve missed so many days due to weather. I know that it can be hard to keep students' motivation up during this time of year, but it is crucially important that we do whatever it takes to keep them moving in the right direction so that they can maximize their learning in the time that we have left.  Each day we strive to make our students stronger learners, stronger thinkers, better collaborators and better communicators.  We hope that the skills we are trying to instill will take them far as they become the leaders and the innovators of our next generation.  So let's strive to keep their motivation high, to celebrate all of their success, and to make the best use of the time we have remaining this year--we'll be running out of it before we know it.