By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

The Lake Orion Community Schools Board of Education met on Feb. 13 at the Lake Orion Administration building and heard updates on the inaugural year of the STEM program at the elementary level.

Due to an abundance of canceled school days, this was the first board meeting in five weeks, according to board President Birgit McQuiston.

The board had a packed schedule for the night including a number of presentations.

Jamie Kimber, Lake Orion’s DK-12 Science Specialist and instructional coach, along with the three new STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) coaches, Pam Moreman, Amy Bohm and Andrea Brook, took the podium to update the board on what they’ve been doing with the elementary level kids during the first half of the school year.

This is the first year of elementary STEM coaches in the Lake Orion school district.

“Having three elementary science coaches in the elementary schools, this is something that, as I talk with other districts in the county, that just doesn’t happen,” said Kimber. “Your forward thinking and your innovation and your desire to have students succeed really shows with this. We appreciate that.”

With technology on the rise, Lake Orion has been focusing on providing a modern education to students that involves greatly expanding and updating their STEM programs.

“I want you to think for a moment about a science class that you had growing up and what that experience was like. So maybe you sat in a classroom…with desks and rows, quite possibly you took some multiple choice test that you had to recall a bunch of information and maybe there was a huge list of vocabulary terms,” said Brook, painting the picture of the science education most received. “If you did a lab or experiment it was usually after you learned the content to kind of confirm what you already knew and the teacher may do a demonstration that you could passively watch.”

Brook explained that with that model, her fear was that students would be left behind because of the way science was being taught.

“At present, we have a whole different model for teaching science education,” she said. “What everyone has always known is that young children are natural born scientists. So maybe the way we were teaching science really wasn’t jiving with the way that kids learn science.”

Currently, the Lake Orion STEM coaches use a three-pronged model with the same content. What students need to know is still at the ground level but the model also includes two other components – what is it that scientists do? and what are those big ideas in science that follow us from grade level to grade level?

These three dimensions come to life through various instructional practices that have been implemented by the STEM coaches.

“The whole point of these instructional practices are really getting the students to think and act like scientists,” Bohm said.

These instructional practices include:

• Note booking. “Students are using notebooks to collect data, to record their thinking that they may, over time, revise or change as they figure new things out during investigations that they’re conducting together in class,” said Bohm.

• Making thinking visual: conceptual modeling. Students work together to draw out what they are figuring out and to show the science concept that they are working to understand. This not only benefits the children but also allows the coaches and teachers to get a better idea of the student’s current understanding.

• Peer feedback. “Giving the opportunity to talk to their peers to become a community of learners…Telling someone what you like about their work, asking them questions, giving suggestions, not only helps the group that they’re giving the feedback to but it also solidifies their learning,” said Moreman.

• Discourse and Consensus building. Students sit together in a circle on the floor and have an open discussion (no hand raising) to answer questions such as, “What did you learn?” “What did you figure out?” and “Where are we going next?”

“We want them to act like scientists, we want them to act like engineers so they know that this is something that’s really cool that they may want to do in the future,” Moreman said.

The elementary STEM coaches strive for the success of teachers and students and wish to instill inspiration into the minds of their young students.

In order to do this the coaches collaborate with the elementary teachers on lesson plans so the teachers know where the students are going and what goals and practices they are participating in.

They are also continuously analyzing student work, not just collecting assignments; they are keeping track of student work in the moment while they build models or during peer review. This allows the coaches to have a better understanding of where the students need to go next and how they can support both the students and their teachers, the STEM coaches concurred.

Jeremy Moede, a fifth grader at Orion Oaks, his mother Andrea Moede (also a fifth teacher at Orion Oaks) and his teacher Norman Wright, joined the coaches to provide a student perspective on this new method of teaching science education.

“Before the science coaches, we only did a few experiments in the whole year and it was mostly the teacher doing the experiment so we just sat and watched. It was really boring,” Jeremy said. “Now we do more experiments, sometimes for a week or two we do one everyday, so it’s a lot of experiments, which is fun. We do them by ourselves or in a team. We write about our results in our notebook and study our evidence. We show what we learned by writing letters…or doing PowerPoint presentations. This is way better than written tests because I can prepare my answer and chose what form I use to show my learning and share with other scientists.”

Both Moede and Wright sung the programs praises saying that they enjoy having the collaboration with the coaches.

“From the long-term learning and planning to the short-term planning, it’s been amazing. They take us through the learning progression…it’s helpful to have the big picture across grade levels,” said Moede. “And then in the short term, when we’re getting ready for a new unit we sit together and create a summary table. And the summary table takes the big overarching science question that they’re going to work hard for the next few weeks to break apart bit by bit to answer smaller questions along the way.”

“I never thought that I would be as excited about science as I have been…like Jeremy said, it gives the kids a chance to be engaged,” Wright said.

The partnership between the coaches, teachers and students is unparalleled to that of districts nearby, they said.

“We are the envy of all of the neighboring districts, this I can tell you,” said Brook. “It’s just been such a powerful experience to have multiple teachers in the room to engage in content with students.”