Embedding Literacy in STEM
Project-based STEM investigations provide students with excellent opportunities to read, write, and communicate. By integrating literacy with STEM, student competence can be increased in both subjects. In this program, teachers learn to identify opportunities in STEM lessons for students to build language comprehension and communication skills as they also learn to think like scientists through discussion, reflection, and writing about their observations, predictions, and procedures.

Career Connections
Guidance counselors and teachers of grades 4 to 9 meet with panels of STEM professionals who describe their career pathways and advise teachers on the skills students need to succeed in high-paying STEM fields. Teachers gain valuable, real-world examples to take back to the classroom and try practical, hands-on activities that build students’ transferrable STEM skills and fulfill Career Education and Work standards. These seminars are excellent extensions of Teacher in the Workplace programs. Themes include Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Women in Science & Engineering.

STEAM and Making: Integrating the Arts with STEM
Arts integration increases student motivation and engagement and includes everything from low-tech engineering design challenges to making with more specialized technologies (like MakeyMakey, robotics, electronics, wearable technology, coding, game design, or 3D digital design and printing). Through hands-on experience, teachers discover how arts content standards and STEM standards can mutually reinforce each other in open-ended, curiosity-driven activities.

Design Thinking
Design thinking is a fast-paced, structured approach to problem solving that begins by developing empathy, and proceeds through phases of brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and testing. Teachers complete a design challenge and learn how to apply this versatile strategy in authentic project-based learning tasks that promote a growth mindset and increase students’ creative confidence.