What classroom structures support Making Thinking Visible for STEM learning?

Engage

Daniel Pink addresses the nature of motivation in humans towards tasks. In his talk, he addresses how intrinsic motivations are far more effective than extrinsic motivations. He focused on how businesses could use intrinsic motivations to make workers efficient. We can apply these ideas to STEM education with encouraging students to think on the own and become autonomous learners. Our goal in STEM education is to help students develop the ability to take the knowledge they already know and apply it to new situations. Currently, the education system tends to focus on small tasks and worksheets. As Pink mentioned in his talk, in these small tasks rewards (grades) can be very effective. However in the long run, if we want these students to be able to tackle more complex tasks and problems with the same toolset, we need to encourage them to think on their own. 

To do this, we could generate a larger problem and work with the students to solve the problem. This problem would be an on-going connection through a semester and students would be challenged to work on it on their own with minimal guidance from the teacher. Small extrinsic rewards can be used to engage the students at the beginning but throughout the school year, teachers need to start taking a step back and letting students have more and more presence in the classroom. 

Explore

Representation, expression, engagement, and assessment are the four principles that the UDL addresses. These principles and practices related to how the text How People Learn describes an effective teacher. In the text, the teachers are encouraged to create an environment where students are constantly evaluating and reflecting upon themselves. And in order to create such an environment, the students should be given a chance to investigate which is usually done with modeling. Then a chance to organize their thoughts and report allowed should be given. Different methods can be used for this but the nature of the report is to give the students a chance to express their thinking to other people. Engagement is done through can be done with groups and other students. Assessment can be done with various methods but should be representative of what the student knows and learned. Teachers should not be teaching students in order to pass an assessment.  

These principles resonate with STEM learning perspectives because it addresses making the student the active learner. All the perspectives place the student at the center. The lessons are built around the students' knowledge and abilities. STEM education has been trying to step towards making the students having a "scientist's mind" where they can use what they know and solve new problems.

Extend

Multitasking is possible and younger people are more skilled at it. In the long run, multi-tasking ultimately degrades the quality of work produced.