Blending Craft and Technology

Challenges facing Lora Taylor’s students at STEM School Chattanooga: 

  • – Diverse backgrounds with a wide range of learning needs 
  • – Desire to apply STEM skills to creative and real-world projects 
  • – Title I School with 44% minority enrollment  

Advantages for Lora Taylor’s students: Lora Taylor

STEM School Chattanooga is a public high school deeply committed to project-based learning that equips students with essential skills for a technology-driven world. At the heart of this learning is digital design and fabrication, where students bring their ideas to life using a variety of tools, including 3D printers, laser cutters, electronics, CNC routers, and other equipment that harnesses 21st-century technology. This innovative environment allows students’ talents and interests to shine. 

“My students come from diverse backgrounds, with some having limited exposure to high-quality STEAM experiences before entering STEM School,” Lora explains. “However, they have a strong desire to build skills and engage in activities that connect with their interests, from technology and engineering to artistic design. They are eager to explore new tools and ideas, especially those that blend creative expression with technical skills.” 

Lora sought to incorporate more of the creative process and traditional craftsmanship into her teaching, enhancing her digital fabrication curriculum with hands-on, artistic elements. A veteran STEM teacher who has conducted National Science Foundation-funded research, Lora recognized that incorporating artistic elements could enrich her students’ learning experience. To address this, she designed a Fund for Teachers fellowship to participate in a woodworking workshop at Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program. “Woodworking challenged me to embrace patience and persistence, reminding me that learning is a journey rather than a destination,” Lora reflects. “Professionally, I learned how hands-on learning and embracing mistakes can inspire creativity and resilience in my students.” 

Today, Lora is bridging the gap between her school’s focus on STEM and her students’ interests in art and design. Students are applying the engineering design process through iterative prototyping, just as Lora refined her wood carvings. They are actively designing, testing, and improving their solutions, combining artistic elements with technical skills in projects that are both meaningful and inspiring. 

“My students are learning that mistakes and adjustments are part of the innovation process,” says Lora. “This approach fosters creativity, problem-solving, and perseverance—qualities that align with both engineering principles and the creative processes I explored during my fellowship.” 

Making Math Matter – Teaching About the Gender Pay Gap

Happy International Women’s Day! This year’s theme is “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world” and pay equity is certainly a large part of that equation. After his 2019 fellowship attending Stanford University’s Mindset Mathematics workshop to create a positive math culture that encourages problem solving, Nate Moore (Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences) is using his learning and the topic of women’s pay disparity to teach math with an equitable lens. He shares his story below:

Through my original Fund for Teachers fellowship, I learned the importance of rich tasks in math class for increasing student engagement and enjoyment of math. I have extended that fellowship by participating in groups like #ClearTheAir on Twitter and the NCTM 100 webinar series. Through these professional development opportunities, I have seen that there are many great math tasks available, and even some wonderful tasks incorporating social justice; however, one of my goals as a teacher is to create more tasks that connect with issues my students and I care about.

Through last fall’s Equity Innovation Circle, I had the chance to create some rich tasks that I think are important for kids at my school to know about and that they will also care about. I am lucky to work at an amazing school where I have total control over my curriculum, and I work with incredible students every year.

I know middle schoolers are deeply aware of what’s fair and not fair. I chose to focus in on some of the specific math lessons that I teach and see if I could incorporate more issues of social justice into these lessons.

I have to say, I’m a beginner at this. I also am a believer that change can start slowly. So I decided to focus on creating a few interesting tasks involving these issues of social justice, with the goal of building up a library of these sorts of activities over time.

The first lesson I created had to do with the gender pay gap. In algebra, we often talk about “one step equations” and this topic got me thinking about how we could model and quantify the gender pay gap. I did a bunch of research and because I knew some of my students were interested in soccer, I focused some of my research on soccer; this had also been a prominent example of the gender pay gap recently. So then I had my students, over a couple of lessons, investigate some of the research with me. Using algebra, we were able to learn things about salaries that had not been directly written in the articles. We modeled the pay gap in different ways and looked at more data around gender pay gaps in other fields. I’ll reiterate that I’m a beginner at this and I’m trying to incorporate change in a way that is manageable to me as a teacher, and one area where I still have a lot to learn is in facilitating the reflection and debrief of activities like this.

Especially in math class, it is so easy to see the worksheets, the textbooks, and the standardized test questions and to think that is what math is. This fellowship showed me (and continues to show me) that math is beautiful, free, creative, interesting, useful, fun, visual, and powerful beyond my expectations. Now, I get to figure out how to share that with my students in ways that are relevant and memorable to them.

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Nate Moore is a math and science teacher at the Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences. He loves learning along with his students. For the past 11 years, he has strived to create engaging learning experiences for middle schoolers. Nate is especially proud of the River Warriors project, through which students have collected data and engaged in ecological restoration at the Santa Fe River since 2010.You can follow Nate’s teaching on his blog and Twitter.

FFT Fellows To Host Webinar on Building Global Communities

They gathered data in national parks, followed the Brothers Grimm through Germany, researched the secret to happiness in Southeast Asia, built an aquaponics system in Africa, and conducted interviews in Northern Ireland. Now they apply those experiences in the classroom and they want to share strategies  — and learn your own — for connecting students to global peers.

On Wednesday, February 19th, Fund for Teachers is hosting its inaugural webinar series designed to facilitate learning beyond the initial fellowship experience. All teachers are invited and encouraged to participate. Registration for the event is available here.

A little more about our panel…

Connecticut Fellow Dory Moore connects her students with peers in Michigan and Bermuda using Flipgrid.com. Students in each location design underwater robots to collect water and sand samples, then use the Flipgrid platform to sare ideas and prototypes. This spring, these citizen scientists will meet up in Bermuda (using grant money Dory secured) to test their designs and collect data on the invasive lion fish.

 

Kate Craven is a library media specialist who helps students practice research skills using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Her fellowship in Germany led to a collaboration through the German American Partnership Program and now map how each country is meeting indicators of the United Nations Global Goals.

 

 

 Carly Imhoff uses Empatico to be matched with international classrooms and connect through live video. They are currently sharing projects about climate change and renewable energy. (Her students also taught students in Nigeria about “Baby Shark” and they shared a hand clapping game.) Carly’s students also use Flipgrids to share with peers in Uruguay Lego creations for UN Sustainable Development Goals.

 

 

Oklahoma Teacher of the Year and two-time FFT Fellow Donna Gradel developed long-term relationships with a school and orphanage in Kenya that has resulted in two student expeditions there to implement an aquaponics and sustainable food initiative they developed in AP Environmental Science.  Watch her tell her story here.

 

 

And Saul Fussiner is a high school writing teacher who has experimented with classroom partnerships between his students, students in other parts of the United States and Ireland.  He has leveraged a virtual pen pal structure using e-mail and Google hangouts, which he talks about in this brief video.

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What questions do you have for these exemplary educators?

Submit them to carrie@fundforteachers.org and join the discussion on February 19th at 4 pm CST.

Register here for the webinar.

What’s Worth Saving?

Researching the Trans-Saharan trade routes in Tangier, Morocco.

FFT Fellows take planes, trains and automobiles in pursuit of knowledge that will engage students. Kristie Blanchard and Christine Troup’s transportation of choice? Camels.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites can be hard to get to.

According to the United Nations Education, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Heritage Sites are cultural and/or natural sites considered to be of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ with special importance for everyone. Everyone, that is, except Kristie and Christine’s students at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT.

“Our rural public high school lacks diversity and global acuity,” said the teaching team. “Freshmen also take a year-long geography course that lacks geospacial technologies used by professionals in the field. We designed our fellowship to explore iconic sites of Catalan, Andalusia and Morocco. Documenting the destinations with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) linked world cultures with geography to emphasize WHY these places have value.”

Taking their lead from the UNESCO theme “Protecting our Heritage and Fostering Creativity,” Christine and Kristie started their fellowship at the Creativity Workshop in Barcelona. There, they deepened proficiencies in the “Four C’s of Deeper Learning” outlined by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills: work collaboratively, improve communication, critical thinking and creativity.

Then, they set off for the Iberian Peninsula to interview citizens and learn from local guides and docents how UNESCO sites represent the cultural landscape of each unique region. Their odyssey took them to:

The question that guided all of their research was “What makes a place worth preserving?”

Kristi and Christine began the school by addressing the lack of Middle Eastern and European elements in their curriculum. An ESRI Story Map documenting the fellowship models for students how technology can bridge information with authentic learning in multiple aspects of their lives and their community.

“In keeping with our fellowship’s guiding question, students will be challenged to find sites that they believe are worth preserving in our town,” said Kristie. “Through research, inquiry and writing, students may influence the Historic Preservation Office of Connecticut to add additional sites to their register.”

“We’re now able to make text-to-world applications through our experiences and gathered artifacts,” added Christine. “By using new techniques, all students, including those who read and write below proficiency level, will be encouraged to participate in more personalized ways to tell their authentic stories, as well as those of our community.”

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Christine Troup has taught grades 6 – 12 in three states over the past 23 years. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, and traveling, or any combination of the three. Kristie Blanchard has specialized in teaching 9th grade Geography and 10th grade AP Human Geography for nearly 20 years. Her career accomplishments include: the National Council for Geographic Education Distinguished Teaching Award, New England St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society’s Friend of Geography Award, and the American Geographical Society Teacher Fellow.