San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area schools embrace STEAM to create ‘lifelong problem solvers’
As more and more technology jobs emerge in and around the Bay Area, STEAM education is steaming along.
For students, this means more science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) classes. For parents, it translates into better-than-ever course selections and increased opportunities for kids to find subjects that are appealing.
Put differently, STEAM is perhaps the most important focus in all schools today.
“STEAM is crucial in all areas of education,” said José Carlos Arriaga, a fourth grade Spanish bilingual teacher at Lockwood STEAM Academy in Oakland. “STEAM incorporates real-world applications that helps bridge student’s learning into becoming lifelong problem solvers, and it helps create higher engagement in the classroom as students love engaging in project-based learning.”
Arriaga went on to say STEAM “allows students to discover and brainstorm solutions to everyday problems, they collaborate with their peers and engage in thorough academic discussions that mimic a reallife work setting.”
Arriaga is a great ambassador of STEAM; Lockwood is considered a top STEAM school in the region.
The school strives to make STEAM a cross-curricular focus for teachers across grade levels and aims to integrate and reinforce STEAM problemsolving skills everywhere students are learning.
Lockwood also implemented the FIRST Lego Robotics League to introduce students to the fundamentals of engineering as they design, code and create unique solutions to real-world problems. Arriaga noted that the school shaped the program with a design-thinking framework that students can take on in their future studies.
“At the center of our league are the core values that transcend to their daily lives such as cooperation, discovery, inclusion and community sharing,” he said. “Students are learning how to engage in academic discussion and collaboration as they try to work together to solve a common problem.”
Another standout school for STEAM: BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, where students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades must complete 7.5 hours of biology, chemistry and physics each week. Graduates of the school must pass all three sciences at the honors level and must complete and pass the exam for at least one Advanced Placement math and science course.
According to the BASIS website, the curriculum “prepares students to be participants, not spectators, in the dynamic, exciting, and unpredictable world of the 21st century.”
This means all students take high-level mathematics courses earlier than usual, and that the entire math curriculum is rooted in the
Saxon Math program, starting off one grade level ahead of the sequence.
From pre-algebra on, the BASIS curriculum adopts the Martin-Gay Developmental Math Series.
A well-rounded education is on the agenda at The Nueva School on the Peninsula.
Here, though STEAM is a big part of the curriculum, school administrators and educators alike believe STEAM should be part of a broader and deeper approach to learning.
“Nueva doesn’t identify as STEAM school; we have a strong STEAM program but equally strong humanities and arts programs,” said Angi Chau, director of the school’s innovation lab, where most of the cuttingedge STEAM projects and curriculum are put into place. “We believe the future is all disciplines, not just one.”
As Chau explains it, the name of the game at Nueva is project-based, datadriven learning. It just so happens that often this learning revolves in some way around STEAM.
An intern program this summer, for instance, focused on a mystery bacteria lab in which students tested bacteria and examined it under a microscope to try to determine what it was. The group worked to revise the existing methods for identifying the bacteria to make them easier for students to follow, and they developed new tests to better distinguish between similar strains of bacteria.
Other Nueva programs throughout the year follow a similar tack.
At The Harker School in San Jose, STEAM is baked into everything, starting in transitional kindergarten and going all the way up through 12th grade. The school has a lower, middle and upper school.
Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, said that one of the school’s standout STEAM programs is a science symposium that empowers upper-school students to showcase all the research and data collection they have done over the years.
“There’s a win-or-lose aspect but really the symposium goes beyond competition,” Gargano said. “It’s a day of showcasing all the research our students have done, of taking their high intellect in all these different areas. When you know these things in deep ways, you can almost naturally put them together with the aid of a mentor.”
All told, Harker’s upper school offers 115 different electives — more than half of which are STEAM. Interestingly, computer science is not one of these electives, meaning every student must take the class as a prerequisite.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area, other STEAM programs are designed to supplement existing school programs and provide additional tutoring to help students wrap their heads around these different subjects.
SF STEM Academy, for instance, is a program offered through the Japanese Community Youth Council to help teenagers from all over San Francisco gain familiarity and comfortability with high-level STEAM concepts and curriculum. The program hosts weekly workshops, field trips and academic and wellness support, as well as college application assistance.
What’s more, SF STEAM offers summer internships at $16.50 per hour and $250 cash rewards for students who attend a certain number of workshops.
Arriaga, the teacher at Lockwood, said it’s important for parents to ask lots of questions about STEAM curriculum as they’re considering new schools and to be prepared to push back if the answers are nebulous or not specific.
As Arriaga sees it, STEAM has been a buzz word for many years, but didn’t really “come of age” until the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a need for technological literacy for both students and teachers. Looking forward, he said his school’s goal is to encourage all teachers to incorporate STEAM units or cross curricular topics in their classroom to bridge the learning happening in their STEAM enrichment class.
“In order to make this happen, we are hoping to have a STEAM exposition where students across grade levels prepare a presentation/project in their classrooms to present to the entire school and community,” he said. “We are hoping that this will encourage all students to have an interest in STEAM and demonstrate an understanding of the real-world application of STEAM topics and problem-solving skills.”
Sunday, September 25, 2022 • Education Guide • Advertising Feature