Yesterday, we shared our "what a new kind of STEM school could look like" proposal. But you may have noticed that some important things were missing.
(Well, first off, math! But stay tuned for that t'morrow.)
We left out three important things — MakerSpaces, coding, and documentaries — because Kristin and I don't know how to integrate them with the rest of the curriculum.
And that's bad. Everything connects to everything; disconnected subjects are (in our vision) verboten. Got any thoughts about how these can fit into a school? Please let us know!
Oh, and there's one other thing that's missing — but that's quite on purpose! (Hint: IT'S TEXTBOOKS.)
Missing: A MakerSpace.
How do we fit in a MakerSpace?
Right now, we're planning to invest good time into having kids puzzle out how stuff works. But they should also be making stuff themselves.
Enter the MakerSpace movement: throwing people into rooms full of tools to actually construct stuff.
How can we incorporate this into our schools?
Missing: Coding.
You hear a lot about how coding is the next basic skill — and, actually, I'm prone to believe that.
Even for students who don't end up choosing to pursue any adult-level coding skills, having dipped one's toes into the art of coding does two important things:
- Logic. I remember my surprise when I asked my college logic instructor about which classes I should take if I wanted to pursue the subject further. "Coding", she replied. But I shouldn't have been shocked: at its heart, coding is applied logic.
- Problem-solving. Programming is hard. Practicing it means getting really good at solving problems: breaking them down into sub-problems, and holding up all the connections in your head. We want to cultivate this skill across the board; programming can help.
- End alienation. As I've written about technology, those of us who feel like machines are magical are divorced from the actual wonder of the world. "The magic", to quote Steven Stevinus again, "is not magical". That's why it's magic. Learning to code connects us to the world around us.
Missing: documentaries.
There are, of course, wonderful documentaries that have been made on science — both the old and new versions of Cosmos come to mind. These can take people into imaginative experiences that they could never otherwise get — at least, not without access to an electron microscope or particle collider.
We think a new kind of school should be unapologetic in showing and re-showing these videos, and should help kids do something with them (take notes?)… but we’re still not sure exactly what, and how to integrate these into the curriculum.
ALSO MISSING (BUT PURPOSELY!) — TEXTBOOKS:
No textbooks are mentioned here — this is quite intentional! We’ve rarely seen a science textbook that did a good job of communicating scientific ideas to the reader. Sometimes it’s because the “science” is faulty; more often, it’s because the books are utterly and truly boring, written to pass the review of a curriculum board, rather than to keep the attention of an 8-year-old.
Historically, one of the main purposes of textbooks has been to compensate for the untrainedness of the teacher. As we'll start by hiring teachers who are serious learners — an idea at the heart of Imaginative Education — we won't need textbooks to fulfill this role.
Textbooks — even very good ones! — cannot inculcate students in scientific thinking. At best, they can help with that. Typically, they substitute for scientific thinking: kids think “science” is merely a bunch of facts to be learned, when the ethos and method are equally important. (A PhD science friend complains about how Chinese students, especially, come in unprepared to do science, though their book learning is excellent.) If we want to prepare kids to enter STEM fields, we should be careful about how we use textbooks.
So does that mean no science books? Perish the thought! Engagingly-written science books are a wonderful idea. (There are so, so many of these — Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer is an example.)
Books externalize and “glue down” information in a way that allows students to focus on it for an extended time. They also allow a much greater bandwidth of scientific knowledge into the classroom. The classroom ought be filled with these, and students ought be given chances throughout the day to peruse them.
Tomorrow: what a math curriculum for a new kind of STEM school could look like!
