Teacher Case Study: Todd Hornseth

Ninety-One K-8 School (OR)

A Defined STEM Learning Experience From:

Todd Hornseth

7th & 8th Grade Science Teacher

Ninety-One K-8 School (OR)


Performance Tasks: 

15 literacy performance tasks


Here’s What We Did:

Every year, all 8th graders are required to do a large literacy task. We use Defined STEM to structure their projects. Students had an option of 21 different performance tasks to choose from. I cut and pasted the introduction paragraph from Defined STEM for each task to give the students an idea of what it was about. From there, students chose what they wanted to work on. In all, 15 different tasks were selected.


Students did a great job on the writing because they got to choose something they were interested in rather then being forced to write about something else. The way the lessons are connected to the real world gets the students wanting to learn about the content.


Why Defined STEM Was the Perfect Fit:

It has always been a struggle for our Language Arts teachers to get multiple sources of content and videos that are required for the annual 8th grade literacy task. I learned about Defined STEM during a STEM Hub meeting and saw the potential to team up with the Language Arts teacher to give the students a lot of choice on what to write about. So for the last two years we have been using Defined STEM directly for the 8th grade literacy task. Defined STEM requires very little work on my end to set up. Everything is there for the tasks and it is so well designed that all I have to do is give the kids a code to access it and they’re off and running.