Practical Guidelines to Advancing STEAM Education in Your School (Part 1 of 2)
Foreword: Driven by a common passion for improving the education space, my team at MIT Sloan School of Management initiated K-12 Mens et Manus, an independent study that helps K-12 schools advance STEAM education by learning from MIT. (Note: “Mens et Manus” is MIT’s motto, which means “Mind & Hand” in Latin.)
After gained inspiration from MIT’s philosophy towards STEAM education, how can educators work towards advancing their schools’ STEAM education offering? How can we effectively bring about and manage organisational change?
One of the cornerstone models for organisational change was developed by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s, and it is still widely practiced today. (Kurt Lewin was a psychologist known as a modern pioneer of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. His notable experiences include being the Director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT.) Lewin’s model is known as “the 3-Stage Model of Change: Unfreeze — Change — Refreeze”:
The article below focuses on “Stage 1: Unfreeze”. Our team came up with exercises to help K-12 schools reduce the forces that try to maintain its behavior at its present level.
What is Unfreeze?
In the Unfreeze stage of Lewin’s 3-Stage Model of Change, the main focus is to reduce the forces that try to maintain an organization’s behavior at its present level. Since human behavior is established by past observational learning and cultural influences, it is important for members of the organisation to unlearn old beliefs or practices that they were used to. To increase the readiness and motivation to change, members of the organisation need to be able to identify the reason to unfreeze, such as where, when, and why the change is necessary.
Exercises that facilitate the Unfreezing stage
To facilitate the Unfreezing stage in schools, our team has come up with four tools/ exercises:
1. Assess Readiness in STEAM Education
What and Why?: An important step to enable unfreezing is to assess the school’s current situation in implementing STEAM education. Our team has created this tool so that educators can reflect on their schools’ readiness and on STEAM-related action steps moving forward.
How?: We recommend stakeholders within each school to fill out the assessment individually, come together to compare the differences in perspectives, and identify major areas for improvement.
2. Rethink Current Practice via Double-Loop Reflection
What and Why?: Decision thinking moves between reflection and action. By engaging in the cycle of “observing our previous action, reflecting on what we have done, using that observation to decide how to change our next action, and applying that decision to another action”, we hope to improve our behavior or the norms of our organization. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon described this process as single-loop learning and argued that such a process is only effective in simple systems. This type of thinking creates barriers to make necessary changes because single-loop learning fails to question the assumptions and norms of the system.
Gareth Morgan highlighted the limitations of single-loop thinking by using the example of a household thermostat. A thermostat moves through the single-loop cycle of monitoring the environment for deviation from the set temperature and correcting it. However, using a single loop, it cannot determine if the preset temperature is appropriate for the people in the room. In order words, since it cannot question the established norm, it cannot change its behavior and learn to do its job more effectively. A truly effective contribution to a system would require engaging in a second learning cycle, which is referred as double-loop learning.
How?: Nelda Cambron-McCabe and Janis Dutton proposed that double-loop reflection should contain at least two distinct components: reconsider and reframe. Our team recommends that educators adapt these questions suggested by Cambron-McCabe and Dutton when reflecting on advancing STEAM education in their schools:
3. Define/Redefine STEAM Learning Goals
What and Why?: A famous saying goes like this, “If you don’t know exactly where you are headed, then any road will get you there.” According to Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, “we (educators) are quick to say what things we like to teach, what activities we will do, and what kinds of resources we will use; but without clarifying the desired results of our teaching, how will we ever know whether our designs are appropriate or arbitrary? How will we distinguish merely interesting learning from effectively learning?” Wiggins and McTighe are amongst many educators and researchers who propose adopting a backward design when designing curriculum, instruction and assessment. Many MIT initiatives, e.g. MIT Technology-Enabled Active Learning Initiative (TEAL) and Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate Initiative (CDIO), also adopts the same learning principle.
How?: Adapting resources from the Portrait of a Graduate initiative (initiated by US non-profit organisations Battelle for Kids and Edleader21), as well as New Vista Designs (Boston-based consulting firm that facilitates the designing of 21st century school programs, we have created the following exercise to assist educators to define the intended learning goals for their schools’ STEAM Education, and ensure that learning experiences design align with these goals:
4. Value Stream Mapping on STEAM Offering
What and Why?: All organisations exist to create value. Companies exist to create value for its customers and stakeholders, while education exists to create value for students and the society. However, even though value creation is a core purpose that organisations exist, it isn’t always where we spend the bulk of our time and energy.
Initially developed 20+ years ago for the manufacturing industry, lean thinking is a management philosophy to eliminate “waste” within a system without sacrificing productivity. One of the most widely practiced tools within lean management is Value Stream Mapping, which helps teams find and eliminate wasteful activities to streamline operations and improve quality. A Value Stream is a sequence of activities an organisation performs to address a customer’s request. The goal of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is to map out the current flow of goods, services and information, generate an ideal future state, and put forth a plan to achieve the future state.
The key elements of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) are as follows:
- Customer Focus: The customer is the most important entity for each organisation. Start with the customer and see what can and should be improved for their benefit.
- Strategic Level Approach: Focus on the strategic direction and don’t be tied up in the weeds.
- Holistic Organizational View: Most organisations are coalitions of silos. VSM breaks downs the barriers between functional silos to uncover improvement opportunities across the entire value stream.
- Waste Detection: In all processes, there is waste (i.e. anything that does not add value to the final product). VSM exposes waste in a process and provides the visibility and the opportunity to eliminate it.
Adaptation to lean thinking in the higher education space has grown increasingly popular in the recent decade, and our team believes that such methodology will hugely benefit the K-12 space too, and can be customized to suit the needs of improving STEAM education offering.
How?: We have created the following exercise in hopes that educators can reap the benefits of VSM:
[Stay tuned for the next article on “Stage 2: Change” & “Stage 3: Refreeze”.]
This article is originally published at www.k12mensetmanus.com. Do visit the website for insights on what K-12 educators can learn from MIT’s STEAM philosophy, and how they can advance STEAM education in their schools.
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