A Defined STEM Learning Experience From:

David Fitzpatrick

9th & 11th Grade English Language Arts Teacher

Reedsburg Area High School (WI)

Performance Task:

Earth Scientist

Here’s What We Did:

Survey courses, like most ninth grade English classes, fall into monotonous patterns easily. Rather than just reading different unrelated nonfiction pieces, we used the Defined STEM task to give our reading a purpose and goal. The Earth Scientist task requires students to provide a Caribbean government and the general public of this country with information about the benefits of using geothermal energy in place of fossil fuels.

Even those students who typically aren’t engaged in English were interested to see whether their hypotheses were correct and knew that missing work would set them back. They couldn't simply pick up what they’d missed when we started reading the next piece.

Introducing a challenge from the start definitely increased engagement. Having a more practical, tangible end goal kept more of my students motivated than when I’m simply “going over” different styles of writing. We never needed to worry about drawing real-world connections. The implications of the task were so real-world that my students were researching additional articles unsolicited.

Why Defined STEM Was the Perfect Fit:

During the 9th grade English nonfiction unit, I decided that too many of the pieces we were studying were disconnected bubbles. Defined STEM provided me a simple way of incorporating different types of writing and reading all nicely leading to a tangible end goal. We read articles and had discussions with the end in mind at all times.