Nuffield Curriculum Centre

News

STEM and creativity at Key Stage 3
Thu, 1 May 2008

Nuffield Curriculum Centre

A large group of science, technology and maths teachers, curriculum developers, and advisers have just spent a week together at a ‘PAL Lab’, an intense period of creative thinking about how the Science Technology Engineering and Maths can be taught, and about ways of linking them together. It was both a reflective and a driven experience, a real learning journey for the participants – and it should help the learning journey of our students too. We are finding ways of helping teachers to engage too.

We are starting by working in the context of the Olympics, and our aim is that students have a real sense of improving their skills and getting better. It will be an educational opportunity for teachers too as they participate in the process of developing new ways of teaching and learning at Key Stage 3.

We plan to produce pilot materials and make them available for use, comment and improvement on the STEM website – a wiki site to which all can contribute. See
http: //www.nuffieldstem.org/

Photo: STEM PAL Lab in action
A creative week
During our week at the PAL Lab the five groups of participants co-ordinated to produce a mass of ideas as a starting-point for producing resources and teaching approaches.

• Teaching methods: the ‘What-if Olympics’ is exploring the practicalities of interactive learning at key stage 3.
• Starting with the students: the ‘Ad Hoc Olympics’ uses creative thinking about the curriculum content with the interests of the students as a starting-point.
• Learning through games: the PIES (Physical Intellectual Emotional and Social needs of athletes) uses the context of the needs of a community and the specialists who can address this – good for careers too.
• Content and cross-curricular links: ‘Designing and making a kinetic sculpture’ is about organising and linking content in a way that real teachers in real school departments could actually do.
• Management of cross-curricular learning and helping students to develop their skill areas. ‘Be my best’ software development.

Photo: Bore Place, Kent, where the PAL Lab happened

What happens next
Now Cris Edgell and his team are working with participants to develop the ideas in consultation with teachers and schools. Please participate - see A devolving project.

See right for the beautiful surroundings in which we did our thinking ... we admit that the rest of the project won't be like this.