Project-based learning and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education have been tenets of our school district—in some way, shape, or form—for over twelve years. We have partnered with agencies to provide training and support and to work with us to develop the first socially designated K–12 STEM pipeline in the state of Ohio. It has given us context and perspective as we have navigated the growing disparities in education for decades.
While implementing STEM and project-based learning (PBL) in some of our schools, we also discerned that, by only doing so in select schools, we were contributing to the divide between students with means and those without. Our “STEM schools” have always been schools of choice, meaning parents selected to attend them. In doing so, those schools were given more resources and better training. Thus, many students thrived.
As we began to tear down these inequities in 2017, we asked ourselves, “If STEM and PBL are good for some kids, why are they not good for all kids?”
Consequently, we changed our approach and began implementing these tenets across our entire school district.
Project-Based Learning and STEM
Across America, some schools are doing STEM, and some are doing project-based learning. We aimed to leverage the strengths of both. Project-based learning and STEM can each help schools target rigorous learning and problem-solving. Given the state of our society, producing students who learn deeply and are equipped to solve problems is essential to the further positive development of our world. STEM education and PBL are not simply a process of teaching course content. They embody a method of teaching kids to be scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians prepared to identify and address societal problems. As we prepared to close out the 2019–2020 school year, little did we know that our STEM and PBL work would pay significant dividends. A number of challenging moments lay in our future.
The Pandemic’s Impact
In the spring of 2020, our entire world found itself amid a growing global pandemic that threatened our lives and livelihoods. Our country was at the precipice of political debate that would rip apart levels of grace and respect in ways that most of us have never seen or experienced. Our lives as school leaders would change quite drastically. We were forced to leap into a mode of thinking and planning that no one had conceived in history. Our entire world was about to make a drastic shift.
After decades of exacerbating stark inequities in schools across America, we were finally confronted with a glaring need to change and create educational spaces that truly allow for access and opportunity for all students. STEM combined with PBL assisted us in creating a playing eld of relevant content, rigorous instruction, and equity. Shameful as it may appear, it took this global pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, to date, to unpeel the onion of inequity in America’s schools. It forced us to realize that we indeed had to change if we were committed to eradicating such constructs.
A Need for Change
The need for change played out in real-time in school districts everywhere. On Friday, March 13, 2020, the Governor of Ohio announced that he would be closing all school buildings across the state due to the growing concerns about COVID-19 and its impact on communities. As cases of COVID increased, hospitalizations pushed medical facilities to the brink. Deaths continued to mount. School leaders had to plan for teaching and learning in ways that had never before been imagined. While school buildings were closing that following Tuesday, “school” had to continue so students could stay engaged with their learning. Teachers would have to continue to teach the curriculum. Assessment of learning still needed to take place. Special education, gifted, and language acquisition support for new immigrant students would need to continue.
Facing a Conundrum
The vast problem that we all faced at that moment was already multifaceted, and it would evolve quite quickly. It also revealed our ignorance of the lack of access. So many of our students and families lacked access to things that many of us took for granted.
How exactly would we work to create this paradigm? And how would we work to organize and prepare teachers to instruct 100 percent of their students through a computer device while they all sat in the confines of their own homes? How would we approach getting computer devices in the hands of thousands of students in a matter of days when none of our students had been assigned and trained on this technology previously? And how might we work to support parents to be able to care for their children, support their educations, provide nourishment and exercise, and ensure that they were attending school each day, all while they diligently worked to retain the jobs that enabled them to provide for their families in the first place?
How STEM and Project-Based Learning Kept Us Equipped
Our foray into STEM and PBL would allow us to adjust more quickly than in some districts. Many of our students were just as equipped to work from home as they were to work at school. As we addressed resources and infrastructure needs to provide all students with access, this perilous venture was about to take another turn that would force us to question what our curricula touted.
On May 25, 2020, a video began to circulate of a Minneapolis, Minnesota street corner where George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man, was killed by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. It was a heinous act of complete disregard for life, dignity, and humanity. Chauvin held his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck as he gasped for breath for nearly nine minutes. This resulted in Mr. Floyd’s death in the public view of the entire world. It was watched by millions across the globe. It brought to light and into full reality the fears many people have harbored for years of police officers and departments. This incident sparked what was already a very contentious relationship between those who advocate for racial and social justice and a system of policing that many feel minimizes the lives of marginalized people.
How Tragedy Impressed the Need for Change
This tragedy further complicated the need to change education. Schools, and many of the habits and beliefs taught in schools since their inception, worked to influence how our society values (or undervalues) the lives of certain groups of people. This, too, must shift toward something far more inclusive. STEM and PBL can play a significant role in making that evolution come to fruition. Skills like collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving are part of any STEM PBL and will be needed for students to learn to effectively embrace change. In a STEM PBL project, teachers teach and assess one or more of these skills.
Humanities Questions
As an example, an eleventh-grade Humanities course explored the following questions:
- How have federal and state legislation led to the disenfranchisement of People of Color?
- How can we teach the Constitution to a younger audience so that they can be advocates for themselves and others?
Language Arts Questions
A high school English/Language Arts class was tasked with the following:
- Driving Question: How does literature help readers explore and understand their world and communities in a way that enables civic involvement?
- Performance Task: You have been tasked with creating an action plan that identifies and addresses an issue within your community. In conclusion, you must provide a product that summarizes your action plan. You will explore multimedia resources (readings/videos, a data website, and community agencies) to form and define your worldview. As a global citizen, determine what you can do to be involved in your world and create change. In your product, cite at least one reference from each resource to illustrate and clarify your perspective. Using the sources from the resource bank and your completed planning documents, create a product that summarizes your action plan. Refer to your checklist and directions for guidance.
Success Skills in STEM and Project-Based Learning
Like the overall project, success skills are part of the glue of STEM education. Students can learn to tackle problems such as this through PBL units. This will also mean using an effective rubric for formative and summative assessment aligned to collaborating, collecting evidence, and facilitating reflection within the PBL project.
STEM design challenges foster this kind of assessment naturally as an organic process. However, PBL can add the intentionality needed to teach and assess the 21st-century skills embedded in STEM that can lead to inclusive practices and recognition of every student who walks into a classroom. All students should be able to see themselves in the curriculum. Effective use of STEM PBL can bring this type of inclusivity to reality.
Political Turmoil
Adding more to the aforementioned powder keg, our country was already embroiled in political turmoil and opposition under leadership that demonstrated wanton disregard and disdain for anyone who expressed disagreement. This psychosis bled into people’s daily interactions. Callous disregard for others, their feelings, and their experiences permeated the soul of America in ways that pitted sibling against sibling, parent against child, and friend against friend.
These disruptions to relationships played themselves out in living rooms and at kitchen tables. Additionally, it showed itself in amid road rage incidents and public spaces such as restaurants and grocery stores. Most disgustingly, the displays appeared on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Facebook, which was created as a platform to unite people, became a tool of opposition and divisiveness. It forced us to sever ties with others whom we had known and respected since our childhoods.
People began to confront people in ways that they have not done in my lifetime. They expressed blatant hatred toward others who happened to be different from them. They also exercised an abundance of “keyboard courage” on their computers and cell phones. Common behavior included antagonizing, belittling, and insulting people they did not know without any fear of ramifications. This would lead to discord that would play itself out in city council meetings, school board meetings, and vast other arenas where somewhat civil public discussion had been the norm.
Addressing Incivility
Is STEM project-based learning a mechanism to address some of this incivility? Yes, it is. As mentioned, collaboration, evidence collection, and thoughtful reflection are embedded in STEM and project-based learning. Those competencies force people of different backgrounds, beliefs, and philosophies to work together to find common ground. This forged authentic, connected relationships. We can use STEM and project-based learning to take steps to overcome political division successfully.
While navigating all that, school leaders faced the stark actuality of mimicking the school environments they were trained to create for their entire careers in a virtual environment for which they had no training. They had to attend to academic needs, social-emotional concerns, and mental health and wellness. They faced food insecurity, technology support, and the “newly discovered” equity issues that existed in districts for decades. To do so would require a new degree of creativity and innovation and a thought process beyond simple “out of the box” thinking. It would require thinking as if there were no box.
Embracing a New Educational Model
Paving a way to overcome such disparity requires schools to embrace a model of education that gives students opportunities to innovatively solve real-world problems, to become socially and emotionally competent, to become effective communicators who know how to collaborate, and to develop as socially aware global citizens. Central to creating such a paradigm is the convergence of STEM and project-based learning, as well as the benefits each has for closing equity gaps and creating opportunities for all students.
In addition to integrating disciplines and attaining success skills, voice and choice are critical components of STEM PBL. To ensure the engagement of all students, they must each have opportunities to shape their own learning experiences. Personal interests may motivate challenges that students want to solve. As a result, education must embrace the notion of a passion-based methodology for teaching and learning.
Second-Grade Problem-Solving
A second-grade class was tasked with the following:
- Conservation: How can we conserve water? How does what we do affect water quality? How can we communicate the importance of the water resources to the community?
- Global Goal: Life on Land: How can we make life on land more sustainable? How can we positively affect native endangered species of Ohio?
Upper-Level Problem-Solving
Upper-level Science students explored the following questions:
- How can we produce “near miss” stunts? (changing velocity)
- How can we predict the location of a car crash? (constant velocity motion)
- How can we imitate an Evil Knievel car through a hoop stunt? (projectile motion)
- How can we use forces to determine the mass of a rock? (force)
- How do baristas make layered drinks? (density)
When they can choose team members and products to produce to solve challenges of interest, their authentic engagement increases. Consequently, their achievement, increases and leads to new and different challenges for them to solve.
Asking Ourselves Hard Questions
As educators, if we are serious about reforming education and creating a system that works for all students, we must ask ourselves a series of questions. How do we address the inequities in communities where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is more significant than it has ever been in our country? How do we assist students in developing as productive citizens armed with the ability to be change agents to improve our society? And how do we empower students with knowledge, empathy, and preparation to be successful citizens of the world?
Those questions and many others are the precursors to many conflicts and disagreements that have brought us to a place where grace, respect, and empathy lack commodities. We have lost our ability to disagree peacefully or to hear the perspectives that others bring. Additionally, we have become isolated in our worlds where we only listen to people who think like us. All others have ceased to be our fellow citizens, becoming our enemies instead. We find ourselves in uncertainty, discomfort, untruthfulness, chaos, and confusion.
Overcoming What Can Destroy Us
We must utilize education as a means to overcome all the things that can potentially destroy us. STEM education and PBL can undeniably positively impact all of these obstacles. They can help create school environments where knowledge is applied in real-world contexts. They can lead to real-world change for the better. Schools must embrace the notion that high-quality STEM education produces high-quality PBL.
The teaching of content and attention to academic disciplines are embedded within STEM. However, it is far more crucial that we focus less on the content and more on the overall pedagogical implications for practical instruction and use PBL to make learning come to life…for every student. Creating schools that see the importance of the convergence of problem-based learning and STEM education and the benefits they have to closing equity gaps and creating opportunities for all students will allow for more productive, better equipped, more empathetic citizens who care about their environments just as much as they care about themselves.
About the Author
MELVIN J. BROWN, ED.D.
As an unapologetic advocate for public education, Dr. Melvin J. Brown has dedicated twenty-eight years to creating educational spaces conducive to effective teaching and learning and fighting for equity in schools that were never designed for the benefit of all. He has served as a teacher, a principal in three schools, a human resources director, an associate superintendent in a large, suburban school district, a deputy superintendent, and a superintendent in an urban, suburban school district. Through it all, he has never lost sight of the need to advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves.
In this chapter, Dr. Brown explores the importance of the convergence of problem-based learning and STEM education and how they coexist to create avenues of success for students from traditionally marginalized and underserved backgrounds. Fueled by the desire to break his cycle of generational poverty, education has paved his way to success. He firmly believes that ensuring all students receive an educational experience that provides them with educational access and opportunity will work to allow them to break cycles of poverty. Dr. Brown is the Superintendent of the Reynoldsburg City Schools (Ohio). He is also a Superintendent-in-Residence and Visiting Professor at The Ohio State University in the College of Education and Human Ecology.
