School News

From STEM to Bloom

Garrett Nichols
PreK through 4th Grade students encountered a whole new world this year when they walked into teacher Anna Grant’s room. Anna, who teaches Fayerweather’s new lower school STEM curriculum, has outfitted her room to look like a science enthusiast’s wildest dream. In Anna’s room, which is nestled at the end of the hall next to the PreK room, full-sized skeleton models cozy up next to elaborate microscopes while posters adorn the walls to highlight the anatomies and habitats of various amphibians, birds, and mammals.

More than just a room full of fun artifacts and instruments, Anna’s room is a place where she hopes Fayerweather students can “establish an identity of scientific literacy.” For Anna, Fayerweather’s STEM program isn’t simply a standalone area where students study the scientific method and then set it aside until they come back to her room. Instead, she’s forming a “community responsive” program: “I’m taking what people are doing in the classroom, and I’m enhancing it,” she says. When students learn how to ask the right questions and embrace uncertainty, says Anna, they’re going to be empowered to keep asking those questions elsewhere.
Blending uncertainty with empowerment is the kind of uncomfortable contradiction that Anna hopes to nourish. “We give our kids a lot of anxiety about uncertainty,” she says. “And in here, you can have just a momentary journey away. You can embrace uncertainty, just sit in uncertainty and realize that if you don’t know something, it’s not that someone else knows that and they’re holding it away from you.”

This approach to STEM education at Fayerweather looks quite different from approaches in other educational settings. When asked to craft the program, Anna pulled from multiple models – from STEAM libraries, to makerspaces, to other lower school science programs. And as she developed her curriculum, she knew that she wanted to create a space of empowerment for young kids.

“I think that in the past in a lot of places if you’re an elementary school kid, you might get lucky if your teacher has like a really cool rock collection,” she notes. “Science curriculums in elementary schools are made for classroom teachers who don’t have a science background, and so they don't always feel empowered to bring in more emergent or community responsive elements to the curriculums that are essentially from a box."

Because of this, students aren't always encouraged to explore outside of a set curriculum, which can have the unintended effect of limiting their curiosity. “There’s not a lot of power placed on young kids’ observations and young kids’ experiences with the world around them and sense making, which is sometimes one of the most exciting and powerful moments in kids’ lives – noticing things in the world around them,” she explains.

Fayerweather’s embrace of place-based learning – essentially, immersing students in the cultures, landscapes, and histories that surround them in order to give them a tangential understanding of the concepts they’re learning – allows Anna to design a STEM curriculum that is dynamic and responsive to the world – and bodies – students live in. “One of my favorite things about teaching is when kids are using their own bodies as a kind of lab,” focusing on their sensory experiences to help them understand how things work.

While Anna is excited to keep building a STEM program at Fayerweather that is truly unique, she does so with an eye on the future – not just for Fayerweather but for STEM education more broadly.

“My dream is that we can develop a model for a community-responsive program that we could bring to other places,” she muses. “Fayerweather could be a proving ground for this kind of program that we bring to other schools that incorporates a STEM approach to learning throughout the curriculum (and not just in a dedicated science class).”
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Fayerweather Street School | 765 Concord Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 | 617-876-4746
Fayerweather is a private PreK, kindergarten, elementary and middle school. We engage each child’s intellect.