Grant’s goal: Better ways to teach STEM

Effort goes beyond science and math and aspires to improve thinking skills for all students

Every month, teams from three school districts in Arizona meet to create ways to improve the teaching of science, technology, engineering and math, commonly known as the STEM curriculum.

The teams seek a new approach in hopes that their districts can become models for the entire state, and perhaps even the nation.

The project is funded through a planning grant of more than $260,000 to the Arizona Science Center from the Helios Education Foundation.

The districts are Scottsdale Unified, Flagstaff Unified and J.O. Combs Unified. J.O. Combs, which serves the San Tan Valley area, collaborates with the Pinal County School Office Education Service Agency.

The Science Center’s president and CEO, Chevy Humphrey, said that when today’s sixth-graders graduate, they will enter a market in which 70 percent of jobs are STEM-based or require STEM skills.

The goal is to make curriculum changes beginning next academic year.

The emphasis will be on improving problemsolving and thinking skills, said Sharon Kortman, principal investigator on the project and vice president of learning at the Arizona Science Center.

That means students will be expected to identify a problem and work toward a solution — in other words, think more like engineers.

“We’re taking the en- gineering design process all the way down to kindergarten and through 12th grade,” she said. “It’s very, very new.”

An example of integrating such content would be a fifth-grade class building a roller coaster with cardboard and a marble. The activity would help them apply the concepts of rate of change and force and motion.

The value of STEM education is that it boosts students in all areas, regardless of their future careers, Kortman said.

Jo Anne Vasquez, vice president and program director of STEM Teaching and Learning Initiatives at the Helios Education Foundation, said the foundation’s role doesn’t end with writing a check.

“Any kind of funding that we provide ... is more than just buying something,” she said. “One of the things we have the ability to do at Helios is to work closely with the grantee. ... We make certain we have all the pieces so they can be successful when they embark on their implementation.”

For her part, Kortman said the overarching goal is to change the way STEM is taught in schools and how it’s experienced by students in all subjects.

“We hope they can learn to be socially responsible citizens as well as highly qualified in skills and knowledge,” she said. “We want students to be workforceready, and they need different levels of skills than in the past.”

The foundation provides grants of various sizes, with the largest given so far being $5 million. The $260,000 to the Science Center is a planning grant, with the possibility of a bigger project in the future.