Strategy 5:
Highlight the social nature of STEM to increase interest and motivation and change the stereotypical perception that STEM jobs require people to work alone. Girls benefit from a supportive environment that offers opportunities to build relationships and form a collective identity. (Capobianco et al., 2015; Diekman et al., 2015; Leaper, 2015; Riedinger et al., 2016; Robnett, 2013; Parker & Rennie, 2002; Scantlebury & Baker, 2007; Werner & Denner, 2009; Cakir et al., 2017; Sammet et al., 2016; Boucher et al., 2017; Clark et al., 2016; Leaper, 2015) |
A precursor to a successful STEM classroom for girls and for boys from underrepresented populations in STEM is that the classroom feels safe and supportive to everyone. This is a STEM for ALL learning environment basic.
Tips
- Provide opportunities for girls to collaborate successfully and help them understand the benefits of collaboration.
- Give girls ownership in the process by designing meaningful team roles that are intellectually engaging and provide opportunities for each girl to contribute to the learning process.
- Create a supportive learning environment by helping girls get to know each other, make connections, and feel comfortable sharing their ideas.
- Share examples of how STEM offers opportunities to work with others, help others, and give back to the community
- Early on in the year, ask students to rate their own collaborative skills – are they active, listen well, move work ahead with summaries, etc. Ask them to debrief after extended collaborative work on their use of collaborative skills and set goals for future work. Then check in quarterly with a rating.
- In small group work, notice which students (if any) are not respectful of other students (ignoring, eye-rolling, avoiding eye-contact). Make some suggestions for collaboration and affirmations to the whole class that would correct these behaviors. Try direct suggestions (instead of...try...). In subsequent group work, notice if this changed students' behaviors and comfort in the group work. If not, approach a group that has members not fully engaged and ask them to reflect on how the group is working.
PLC Activities
- Practice using the jigsaw method as a learning team. Use the articles or resources below as the content that you will "divide and conquer" as a PLC.
- Set up a camera to video your class and review individually or in groups to look for micro-inequities. Or, take turns observing one another's classes. Examine the evidence of warmth, engagement, and rigor. For instance, do you provide eye contact, attention, interest, praise, encouragement, correction in the same manner to all students in the same way? Use feedback to adjust what you do and plan another observation or recording. Change is hard! Discuss with your PLC the strategies you employ to create a STEM for ALL learning environment that is collaborative, social, and community oriented.
- Practice collaboration that facilitates critical thinking using a role playing model or by taking turns bringing to the PLC assignments that you would like to improve. Use listening, paraphrasing, and building on each other's ideas to make improvements to the lesson or assessment ideas. Reflect on how this process goes and consider the strengths/weaknesses of using this model to build collaboration skills in student activities.
- Design a survey for your students to assess their feelings about the classroom environment. Decide on questions as a PLC, and then have students complete the survey during class to get the largest number of responses. Evaluate the findings as a group and determine how to help one another improve classroom climate and culture. Be sure to have students identify their gender and race as questions if doing so can still afford students' responses anonymity.
- Coordinate a focus group of students representing underrepresented voices to attend a PLC and share their suggestions for how your classes/curriculum/program could be made more collaborative, social, and community-oriented.
Additional Resources
Collaborative
Adams, Gupta and Cotumaccio (2014) investigate the ways in which social interactions with peers, educators, and scientists, helps girls build a positive STEM identity. They emphasize how providing collaborative learning opportunities where girls can build trusting relationships with other students helps them see themselves as scientists and persist in STEM.
STEM work requires a high level of collaboration in most cases. But when girls suggest reasons they are not interested in going into fields that have a low percentage of female participation (engineering, computer science fields, physics) their misunderstanding of the solitary nature of that work might be one of the obstacles they name. You can help. Make your own classroom practices model real world collaboration, and design the curriculum to include evidence of collaboration in the field. For instance, ask role models to describe the extent to which their work is collaborative, connect to a classroom elsewhere to complete projects you couldn't do alone, and/or foster inter-dependencies within the class that build on students funds of knowledge. |
Social
Hurst, Wallace & Nixon (2013) talk about how social interaction among students, enhances their learning. Learning in environments that afford meaningful social interaction among students is generally preferable to learning in isolation (author, date).
Give girls ownership in the process by designing meaningful team roles that are intellectually engaging and provide opportunities for each girl to contribute to the learning process. Design direct instruction to include opportunities for formative feedback and peer interaction. For instance, lectures that include opportunities for partners to think about and respond to instructor questions (digitally or using white boards, show of hands etc.), help ensure that students are tracking and accurately processing the new information. |
Community-Oriented
Girls are more inclined to move into STEM professions that they recognize as being a means to "help" others.
Model your curriculum on this reality, because clearly STEM is about helping others! Word problems and projects can be contextualized in a manner to emphasize the pro-social, pro-environment, pro-helping outcomes that can result from success. For instance, Instead of just "building robots" you can "design a robot that can deliver this vaccine to the child who is trapped in a dangerous place. Instead of designing code that improves image quality of a pornographic image (Chang, 2018), you can ask students to design code (imagining) that it could improve image quality for transmission of data from a microscope attached to a phone in Bolivia to a lab that can analyze it at the Mayo Clinic to help mothers have healthy babies. |
Explore the TechBridgeGirls toolkit to find a wealth of resources for facilitating the needs of girls in STEM classes around role models, feeling connected and safe in the classroom, icebreakers, setting up your classroom, and instructional practices that work.
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Jennifer Gonzalez blog Cult of Pedagogy offers a number of useful tutorials and explanations of strategies that can get students collaborating successfully in a STEM classroom.
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Adams, J. D., Gupta, P., & Cotumaccio, A. (2014). Long-Term Participants: A Museum Program Enhances Girls' STEM Interest, Motivation, and Persistence. Afterschool Matters, 20, 13-20.
Hurst, B., Wallace, R., & Nixon, S. B. (2013). The impact of social interaction on student learning. Reading Horizons, 52(4), 5.