Teachers, Don’t Apologize for Your Noisy, Messy, Stem-based Lessons.
By: Becky Grant
Tags: Science, Future, 21st Century Skills, Education, Technology

Last Friday, I volunteered to help 25 kindergarteners assemble buses made from boxes with pencil axles and cardboard wheels. Then, the children tested the homemade buses on various surfaces and thought about friction.

Needless to say, it was crazy. Children argued over who would get to attach the wheels, they struggled gluing down the bits of yellow construction paper, and the wheels on the bus kept falling off during testing.

“It worked so much better last year,” my son’s teacher lamented. “Thank you for your help. I’m sorry the lesson was so chaotic.”

“It was fine,” I replied. “The children loved it.”

Later, when I returned home, I thought of all the things I should have said to my son’s teacher.

What I should have said to my son’s teacher…

I should’ve told my son’s teacher I’m thrilled she’s even attempting to do hands-on, stem-based activities with kindergarteners, that craziness is inevitable when you get a class of 25 children doing a hands-on, exploratory task, and that it’s perfectly normal for experiments to fail in a stem field.

A failed experiment is a lesson in itself. Should you tweak the existing experiment, approach it in a different way, or throw it out altogether and try something else? Failure also provides the perfect opportunity to remind children to have a growth mindset and to help them to look at challenges as a motivator to increase effort and learning.

The Importance of Stem-based Activities for Young Children

“STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. Rather than teach the four disciplines as separate and discrete subjects, STEM integrates them into a cohesive learning paradigm based on real-world applications.”

According to experts “stem-focused programs are rare in elementary school. And they’re even rarer in the K-2 years.”

This is prime time for STEM exposure. Children are naturally curious and love the opportunity to experiment and explore. We should capitalize on this intrinsic motivation in the early years rather than stifle it as we used to do in the classroom.

These days, more and more people are entering the gig economy and working 2–3 jobs to make ends meet without insurance or pension plans. As a parent, this scares me.

While Uber’s founders and investors have made billions, its employees barely scrape by. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have my children in the founder/investor camp than the gig employee camp.

Artificial Intelligence will render certain jobs obsolete as well. I want my children to understand and use this technology, not to be victims of it.

Teachers, Ignore the Advice of Parents and Old School Administrators

Parents and old school administrators expect calm, quiet classrooms where students listen as teachers dispense information. This is not the reality of effective teaching in the 21st century.

I taught elementary school for ten years so I know exactly how my son’s teacher felt after the bus assembly lesson. I was often embarrassed, especially as a new teacher, when my class seemed out of control or the noise level got too loud even though I knew my children were engaged, enthusiastic, and learning important concepts. I figured the veteran teachers would have things under control and it was my poor classroom management and ‘too nice’ persona that created the chaos.

Also, I worried parent volunteers would think I wasn’t a good teacher or the administrators would pop in for a surprise lesson observation when we were in the middle of an experiment that wasn’t working.

Now, after ten years of teaching in two different countries and several different school settings, I know better. A failed experiment is the perfect opportunity to show children the value of persistence and resilience. The best lessons are the hands-on, messy, noisy ones where the children are fully engaged and taking ownership of the learning.

There is no way to lead quiet science investigations with young children. They are too enthusiastic. And, they’re supposed to collaborate with their peers. When children discuss their learning or explain their idea to someone else they are internalizing the vocabulary of the lesson and synthesizing the information.

When 25–30 children talk at the same time, it gets loud. We can teach them to use ‘indoor voices’ or ‘whisper voices’, but it will still be noisy.

Worried about surprise lesson observations from administrators or the judgment of parent volunteers, some teachers shy away from messy, noisy, hands-on lessons with unpredictable results.

Teachers, it’s okay if your stem lessons get loud. It’s okay if the experiment doesn’t work or go the way you planned. This is a great opportunity to show children a growth mindset in action.

If your principal highlights the noise level as a point of refinement, something to improve in your lesson observation, don’t take it to heart. You know you’re teaching the lessons our children need right now.

If a parent says snidely, “When I was a boy/girl we sat quietly and listened to the teacher. We wouldn’t dare speak out of turn or get out of our seat.” Reassure yourself that this old school educational approach does not serve children in the 21st century.

The Problem With The Current Emphasis on Standardized Testing and the Industrial Model of Education

Several articles point out the teacher’s own lack of experience in stem fields as a reason it is not emphasized in the early years, but I disagree.

Elementary school teachers are among the most flexible, unflappable, caring people I know. If they’ve been in the field for at least five years they’ve coped with numerous curriculum changes. Educational policy is constantly shifting.

No, I believe the reason many elementary school teachers are hesitant to embrace the craziness of stem-based lessons is the current prioritization of standardized test results.

If the emphasis on raising test scores continues, teachers will continue to teach to the test rather than spend time and effort on hands-on instruction. If Language Arts and Math continue to be the only subjects tested at the end of the year, then that is what will be emphasized.

We need to downgrade the importance of multiple-choice tests with one right answer. These undermine our efforts to produce a creative, collaborative, critical-thinking workforce.

In his book, Creative Schools, Ken Robinson writes, “Industrialism needed a lot more manual workers than it did college graduates. So mass education was built like a pyramid, with a broad base of compulsory elementary education for all, a smaller sector of secondary education, and a narrow apex of higher education.”

This model no longer serves our children. Today, our needs have changed. A 21st century workforce needs technical no-how and the ability to adapt and come up with creative solutions to the world’s problems.

Phyllis Eisen, vice-president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) writes, “In NAM’s latest workforce survey of U.S. manufacturing employers, 80 percent of respondents said that they had a serious problem finding qualified candidates for the highly technical world of modern manufacturing.”

Furthermore, “the lack of workforce readiness, math and science competencies, and ability to work in a problem-solving, critical-thinking atmosphere was hampering their ability to stay competitive. In a disturbing response, manufacturers reported for the first time that the quality of their engineering and research professionals concerned them. And always, their attitude about U.S. schools preparing a future skilled workforce was negative and despairing. This was not a pretty picture.”

Most of us grew up with the industrial model of education. This is what we expect to see when we visit the classroom, but this model will not serve our children when they enter the job market today or in the future.