Greenwood Elementary Gets the Spotlight at State-Wide STEM Summit
At lunchtime today in the ballroom at Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium, hundreds of attendees at the Iowa STEM Summit were treated to a presentation by Greenwood Elementary Principal Eric Huinker about the impact made by the school’s STEM Scale-Up Grant.
The summit is sponsored by the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council as part of its comprehensive effort to raise consciousness about the importance of science, technology, engineering and math curricula in 21st century education. Grants are also disbursed under the council’s auspices.
Huinker’s report explained that the grant provided training for seven staff members who have implemented the Engineering is Elementary (EiE) curriculum into five classrooms spanning grades 1-5 and serving 118 of Greenwood’s 456 students and also highlighted Greenwood’s multi-layered partnership with Drake University. Background and bullet points out of the way, they rolled the video of Huinker interviewing a panel of 2nd graders who’ve been busy crafting sails and windmills out of tin foil, wax paper, coffee stirrers and juice cartons like a bunch of precocious gadgeteers about the time his audience was pushing their salads aside in favor of dessert.
The kids stole the show. It was like watching one of the AT&T iPhone 5 commercials currently the rage where an adult facilitates discussions of concepts like faster vs. slower and more vs. less amongst a group of schoolkids under the umbrella tagline of “rethink possible.”
Huinker said he hopes to integrate the Engineering Design Process (EDP) school-wide, noting that the basic principles of EDP (ask, imagine, plan, create and improve) are already infiltrating Greenwood’s literacy curriculum simply because the kids naturally transfer them from one area to the others they study.
By way of placing the cutting edge EiE program into its fuller context at his school Huinker told his listeners that Greenwood’s student body ranges from 5th generation Woodchucks to freshly relocated refugees enrolled in ELL. Sixteen languages are spoken in Greenwood homes. Times have changed since the original building first opened in 1901 and the landmark school, along with the rest of the district, is changing right along with them.
Strategies aimed at harnessing the natural curiosity of kids, like EiE, aren’t really any different than figuring out how to use the wind to lift a weight. Ask + imagine + plan + create + improve = THE GOAL.
