Teaching Elementary STEM Education: Unpacking Standards and Implementing Practice-Based Pedagogy

by Sherri Cianca

Overview

This textbook offers practical guidelines for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics into the elementary classroom in the context of addressing real-world problems, and cultivating in students high-level thinking and problem-solving skills. Designed to equip teachers and future teachers with tools to create and implement standards-based STEM curriculum and cognitively demanding tasks, author Sherri Cianca offers hands-on, easily implemented strategies that foster student reasoning, autonomy, and humanity.

This fresh approach to STEM teaching empowers teachers (preservice and inservice) and other leaders to better understand the standards and better design effective instructional practices. The chapters work together to advance teachers’ abilities to achieve mastery-level understanding of content, translate standards into student-friendly curriculum, and create a robust learning environment. Each chapter contains "probes" to uncover incomplete and inaccurate conceptions and to focus attention on key learning elements. Chapter summaries and "Reflect and Apply" sections reinforce professional development, and appendices expand on chapter content and provide rich examples of STEM units, curriculum, and assessment criteria. Dr. Cianca's vision is that teachers serve as well-equipped change agents that will empower their students to transfer STEM learning into applications that will impart a positive impact on our future world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367150914
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/02/2019
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sherri Cianca is an Associate Professor and Student Teacher Supervisor at Niagara University in New York, USA.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. STEM Education

3. Priority Standards

4. Unpack Content Standards

5. STEM Learning Practices

6. STEM Transdisciplinary Integration

7. Planning STEM Tasks

8. STEM as Pedagogy

Editorial Reviews

‘In this outstanding book, Sherri Cianca presents elementary teachers of STEM with a comprehensive and practical guide to enable them to better understand, teach, and assess student understanding of integrated STEM subjects. Dr. Cianca effectively explains and illustrates how teachers can develop a STEM teaching mindset and create cognitively challenging learning tasks that engage all students in solving real-world problems. Highly recommended!’

—Larry Ainsworth, Author of Prioritizing the Common Core and "Unwrapping" the Common Core

This book is a result of years of insightful research and application of theory into practice. Cianca looks at STEM teaching and learning through the lens of integrating content and pedagogy and offers a rich blended model that is organic and free from the arbitrary traditional divisions. Simply put, the book is a valuable resource for all educators.

—Chris Moynihan, Author of Math Sense: The Look, Sound, and Feel of Effective Instruction and Common Core Sense: Tapping the Power of the Mathematical Practices

From the Publisher