The past four weeks have a great overall experience that any educator could only hope to have.\u00a0 STEM education has been and will be a crucial part of\u00a0educating youth for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 Educators today need to focus not only on STEM content but also the success skills and technology skills needed to apply knowledge in present day careers.\u00a0 These skills have been researched extensively and are well known as ones that absolutely need to be targeted in any lesson.\u00a0 What educators have found difficult is how to successfully target these skills in ways that they are used in STEM career fields.<\/p>\n
The biggest success during these last four weeks would have to be seeing these success skills used in all aspects of STEM career fields.\u00a0 I have taken part in leadership meetings, customer service problem solving sessions, helped maintenance fix heavy machinery, seen most of the automated machines in action, shadowed floor technicians, and had multiple discussions\/ interviews with mechanical and electrical engineers.\u00a0 Each one of these instances were invaluable for me as an educator.\u00a0 I was able to see various different success skills being applied in various different STEM business settings.\u00a0 It was interesting to see the different combination of skills needed to complete different daily tasks.\u00a0 Problem solving on the floor, for example, is a different process and needs distinct technical skills.\u00a0 Problem solving in leadership meetings is a much different process and requires an abundance of communication, active listening, and collaboration skills.\u00a0 Being able to integrate these skills in my science lab units will be much easier now that I have seen them applied in real-world STEM scenarios.<\/p>\n
There haven’t been many things that I could consider big challenges so far.\u00a0 One small challenge I have ran into is the sheer complexity of everything involved in STEM career fields.\u00a0 Everything from the computer programming involved in teaching automated machines to be accurate within a few microns to value stream discussions involving every single aspect of the business was a little complicated to comprehend right off the bat.\u00a0 Part of this was due to the technical terminology being used and part was my own education on topics being discussed.\u00a0 One of the first things I reflected on while my head was initially spinning involved how educators could begin tackling the challenge of creating very well-rounded students with capabilities to tackle such a detailed and complicated career that you find in STEM companies.<\/p>\n
Overall, this has been an unbelievable experience.\u00a0 It is hard to put into words how beneficial it has been for my educational career growth.\u00a0 I have\u00a0had so many ideas\u00a0about the future of\u00a0my science lab.\u00a0 Having an Integrative STEM Education background, I view my science lab classroom as a place where more than typical labs\/experiments take place.\u00a0 I want to eventually use project-based design units to teach all elementary school science standards.\u00a0 This internship has given me the confidence and new knowledge sets needed to start tackling this classroom transition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The past four weeks have a great overall experience that any educator could only hope to have.\u00a0 STEM education has been and will be a crucial part of\u00a0educating youth for the foreseeable future.\u00a0 Educators today need to focus not only on STEM content but also the success skills and technology skills needed to apply knowledge … Continue reading Challenges and Successes…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":532,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/532"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.kenanfellows.org\/2018-swoodard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}