STEM Education Through Two Lenses: Leadership and Classroom
After serving as a school principal who was passionate about creating opportunities for authentic learning for students that focused on systems level change, I now return to the classroom as an engineering and robotics teacher, I have had the opportunity to experience education from two very different: 11 years as a building principal working to transition to STEM focused buildings to now as a "2nd" year teacher trying to build an authentic classroom experience that is built around workforce development Both are but deeply connected perspectives. This space is where those perspectives come together.
Why This Blog Exists
Across education, we often talk about innovation, engagement, workforce readiness, and personalized learning. Too often, however, those conversations happen at the system level without enough attention to daily classroom realities—or at the classroom level without enough understanding of the systems that shape them.
This blog is an attempt to bridge that gap.
Here, I reflect on STEM education, personalized learning, and career readiness from the vantage point of someone who has:
Led schools and made decisions about resources, schedules, and priorities.
Taught engineering, robotics, and applied STEM courses where learning is hands-on, messy, and real.
Worked alongside students as they design, build, test, fail, revise, and succeed.
- Experienced failure and success at both...that is part of the process of growing.
The goal is not to promote one role over the other, but to show how powerful education becomes when leadership, vision, and classroom practice are aligned. While I will continue to grow as a teacher as I continue to push my students to ask questions like “Will this work?” rather than asking me “Is this right?”, I will share my journey. I am by no means perfect or have all the answers. What I do have is a unique perspective from leadership and practice. From a principal lens, I know what I asked teachers to do was viewed by many as unorthodox and hard to do. It is much easier to follow a set of standards, teach a standardized classroom, pull out my folder of activities from last year and assess and move on as compared to put a task or a project together and guiding students to find their own answers while trying to blend standards into these challenges. I’m living it now and at times, it is chaos. However, it is good chaos where students have authentic opportunities to learn and engage with problem solving. My challenge is blending the standards and keeping the authenticity. In this blog, I will share my views on this as well as my challenges, successes, and failures.
From the Principal Lens
From this lens, personalized, problem-based learning is not an “extra.” It is a pathway to relevance, equity, and long-term student readiness.
From the Teacher's Lens
From the teacher’s lens, authentic learning lives in daily practice. It is seen when students troubleshoot code that doesn’t work, redesign a part that doesn’t fit, or collaborate to solve a problem with no single correct answer. But let's face it, it is messy and harder to manage a personalized classroom. We envision individual learning plans for every student. I
In the engineering and robotics classroom, learning happens through iteration, reflection, and persistence. Teaching shifts from delivering content to coaching students through the learning process. Engagement increases because the work matters—and students know it (I have failures here that I am learning from but we are progressing or I am progressing).
This lens will also address the challenges that teachers face when transforming from a “giver of knowledge” to a “facilitator of learning” and we release control. It is SCARY. I’m living it now but it is worth the work.
This lens keeps the focus on what students actually experience, not just what is planned or intended.
What You’ll Find Here
This blog will explore:
Authentic engineering and robotics projects
Personalized learning in STEM and CTE classrooms.
Leadership lessons learned from returning to teaching.
Workforce readiness and career-connected learning.
The realities of implementing innovation in a real classroom.
Whether you are a teacher, school leader, policymaker, or community partner, my hope is that this space offers practical insight, honest reflection, and ideas worth trying.
Because the future of education depends not just on strong vision—or strong instruction—but on both, working together.
I appreciate the time reading my blog. I will be sharing my growth as a teacher as I go through the challenges of everyday while also reflecting back on my time as an admin and hopefully connecting with others who share the same passion for authentic personalized learning that I feel cannot be accomplished without STEM.
ReplyDeleteYes, it all needs to be aligned, from in the classroom to the board office - a culture of high quality learning. This style of learning (STEM / Maker Centered) is only unorthodox in that we have not practiced it for a long time. It is just a mashup of ideas from Montessori, Dewey, Papert, Piaget & Vygotsky - and we were taught that those were good ideas. But for some reasons we stopped utilizing them. And it is hard to do...good learning is not easy. Authentic learning, opportunities for voice & choice and putting a piece of themselves in the learning are massive. Being able to explore & utilize curiosity, creativity, collaboration, communication & critical thinking helps them learn so many things, standards and beyond. Educators have to get comfortable with a little bit of "controlled chaos" and be able to give up some control. An environment with hands-on, interactive, meaningful, connected learning is also an environment in which you have better opportunities to learn about your students and build relationships. Much of the learning happens in the conversations that go on while learning. Learning is messy (so is life).
ReplyDelete