STEM's 500 year-old Foundation: Leonardo Da Vinci

Almost 500 years following his death, the name Leonardo Da Vinci still tops most lists of the greatest scientific minds in world history. The “Renaissance Man” with insatiable curiosity and determined innovation, Da Vinci became an accomplished inventor, scientist, mathematician, painter, sculptor, architect, cartographer, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, and writer. Da Vinci's 7 Principles serve as guideposts for STEM/STREAM education today:

1. Curiosità: An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.  

2. Dimostrazione: A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.  

3. Sensazione: The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.  

4. Sfumato (literally means “Going up in Smoke”): A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.  

5. Arte/Scienza (art and science): The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination (“whole-brain” learning and thinking.)

6. Corporalita: The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.  

7. Connessione: A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena.

For 21st century STEM success, our students must learn to solve problems by creative/inventive Da Vincian thinking. “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties” as psychologist Eric Fromm stated, accentuating the fourth of Da Vinci’s Principles.

Our test-centric schools of today may be unwittingly constraining student imagination and creativity by insisting that all thinking must conform to a preordained “correct” answer, rather than allowing for multiple solutions, multiple avenues to arrive at each of them, and more than one suitable answer to the same question or problem. (It is important to note that no high-achieving nation spends as much time, money or organized efforts on standardized testing as we do).

 

 

Why STEM? Why STEM Now?

The latest career statistics and economic projections emphasize the new prerequisites for economic survival in today’s STEM-driven competitive world. Consider the following:

·       The 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported that the average mathematics score for 15-year-old U.S. students was lower than the scores in 18 out of 24 comparison nations.   

·       The number of countries scoring higher than the United States on the PISA science assessment increased from 6 countries to 12 over the past six years.

·       A survey conducted by the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley concluded that 80% of K-5 teachers in the San Francisco Bay area spent 60 minutes or less per week teaching science. Over 16% of them reported spending no time at all delivering science instruction.

·       In the 2013 Horizon Research survey, researchers found that K-2 classes spend an average of 18 minutes per day on science, while grades 3–5 teachers were teaching science an average of 23 minutes per day.  

·       Statistics from the National Science Foundation website indicate that STEM achievement in secondary education is also decreasing overall in American schools.

The conventional practice of delving deeply in a study of the sciences in high school is coming under long-overdue scrutiny. According to a 2010 report from the International Journal of Science Education, over 65% of scientists and science graduate students reported that their personal interest in the sciences began before their middle school years. Building the necessary background knowledge that is essential for success in secondary STEM courses requires an early foundation for science beginning in the elementary grades.

 

 

 

 

STEM: Making Transdisciplinary Connections

Research has shown that approximately 13% of pupils in an average classroom are auditory learners, who learn best by listening to others (typically the teacher). The dominant teaching method of most schools is likely not meeting the learning needs of 87% of our students. Our brains do their best work when we are learning in by doing, not by passively listening.

Scientists, engineers, mathematicians and others STEM professionals spend a great portion of their day applying skills and concepts that fall outside the boundaries of their discipline. The National Research Center found that reading and writing comprise over half of the work of scientists and engineers (NRC 2011).  Speaking, listening, reading, writing, computing, sketching, collaborating with others, etc., make up the typical day for most professionals, where we use these competencies on an as-needed basis throughout the day. It is natural for us to engage in STEM daily if we participate in any brand of regular problem-solving.

By completing the chart below, we are reminded of this important academic reality.

By filling in the appropriate boxes of this chart with students, parents and educators, hopefully, we can reduce the number of times we hear, “Why do I need to know this?”  and “When will I ever use this?” It is through these “aha” moments that students not only appreciate STEM, but they also understand the value of a truly “interconnected” curriculum that provides a multidimensional backdrop for understanding their transdisciplinary world.

The connections their young brains make reach across numerous academic borderlines fostering what we first refer to as knowledge, and subsequently as creative thinking.

Failure IS an Option!

In keeping with our current assessment obsession, educators have unwisely borrowed the popular mantra “Failure is not an option” from the business community (where failures are forgiven, because they are “too big to fail,” but small children should pay a hefty emotional fine.) A deeper examination of this maxim reveals its glaring inaccuracy when applied to both how young brains learn and how inventors innovate.

Students may struggle in school with reading, they often fall short of a perfect score in mathematics, they will frequently misinterpret cause-and-effect relationships in science, it is not uncommon for them to repeatedly make the same spelling errors, and display developmentally-appropriate academic missteps. Occasionally, our students appear to be impervious to the best efforts of well-trained professionals.

 

The goal of academic “rigor” becomes almost rigor mortis for them. In nearly all cases, each learning difficulty is indicative of a naturally occurring neurological under-investment in the necessary brain wiring that is mandatory for successfully demonstrating a specific skill.

 

When we refer to a concept or skill that is not “developmentally-appropriate” to children of a given age, the reference we are making is to their brain development not our curriculum development. With this backdrop, certain academic shortcomings are highly anticipated outcomes.

 

However, these events foster teacher, parent and student frustrations in the meantime, since the child “doesn’t get it”. With time, maturation, and most important, the proper brain circuitry, he/she will surely "get it" quickly and with apparent ease.

 

When it comes to learning, failure is a predictable prerequisite during the lengthy course of converting new information into personal knowledge. This is particularly true when learners lack similar prior learning experiences, which prevents the new information from readily merging with neural pathways that don't yet exist. If there is nothing with which to integrate new knowledge, the conceptual development process must begin from an earlier starting point and new learning can be quite a lengthy process for some children, who are not “slow,” the brain-building process is frequently slow.

 

If learning occurred effortlessly, error-free, easily, and occurred without any naturally occurring obstacles, then wouldn't formal education from the pre-school years to graduate school fall somewhere between pointless and redundant?

In science, technology, engineering, mathematics, architecture, and the myriad other science-related fields, mistakes are not just prerequisites, they are nearly requirements for future success.

 

Most inventors and creative geniuses have a long history of failures leading to their ultimate triumph – the success that they were after from the beginning. Along the road to success, the greatest inventors looked into the face of failure for most of their journey to achievement.

Below are several famous failures, who are only known for their famous successes. Failure was an option, but they became icons for persistence and success, following their early failures.

 

STEM: Leveling the Playing Field for Struggling Students

One of the first revelations for STEM teachers has been that STEM tends to level the academic playing field quickly for students who are typically struggling learners. Distinguishing them from the high achievers in the STEM classroom is frequently difficult. These classroom events become peak motivational experiences for the less-academically proficient student.

 

For many students, feeling a sense of competence through STEM lessons can constitute the first in-school learning occasion that has a tendency to conceal their “low-achiever” stigma rather than to broadcast it. More importantly, this motivational boost can thwart the tendency toward “performance avoidance,” where academic insecurities entice struggling students to dodge classroom participation at any cost in order to mask their well-known history of learning failures.

Auditory Learners

Research has shown that approximately 13% of pupils in an average classroom are auditory learners, who learn best by listening to others (typically the teacher). The dominant teaching method of most schools is likely not meeting the learning needs of 87% of our students. Our brains do their best work when we are learning in by doing, not by passively listening.

The Brain Needs to “Wander and Wonder”

(Part 2)

 

Visual spatial thinking is facilitated most readily through the development of art, imagination, and exploration. Art and visual imagery have been key contributors to the human experience considerably longer than the printed word has. Nearly 2.5 million years ago, hand tools surfaced as an integral part of the daily life for primitive mankind.

The first evidence of prehistoric art forms did not appear until roughly 80,000 years ago.

There is an abundance of signs that the earliest art forms were “manuports.” These naturally-formed or man-made portable artifacts were valued for having an appearance that was similar to any well-known object, particular those that were personally important or appealing. These visually attractive objects were saved and carried about, due to their striking likeness to a fertile woman (e.g., the Venus of Wilendorf), a horse or a bison.

A massive cognitive leap took place with the introduction of tools, language, art, and large-groups living. Coincidentally, a threefold increase in hominid braincase also occurred during this same time period. Each of these new human competencies appears to have significantly impacted the fast-paced evolution of the others. The milestones highlighting man’s evolution include the rapid and sudden advances in human intelligence.

The survival imperatives of 2 million years ago dictated that our ancestors cultivate a keen ability to distinguish a potential opportunity from an impending danger, which meant developing visual memory systems coupled with an awareness of the broad categories that could be used to classify objects in the environment. Upon encountering an object or animal, (1) it could be an animal or object that clearly falls into a particular category, (2) it could concurrently enjoy membership in more than one category, and (3) at first glance, its initial identification could be in error. Being cognizant of the three possibilities prompted the evolution of flexibility in one’s responses, which contributed to our ancestors’ survival.

Our startled reaction to a snake-like vine on the walkway has the precautionary benefit of alerting us to a potentially fatal encounter with a poisonous reptile. In 1915, Edgar Rubin gave the above “is-it-a-face-or-is-it-a-vase?” conundrum a permanent place in visual perception research. Mother Nature can be most unforgiving allowing us only one life-ending miscalculation of this type. Cases of fortuitous multiple identifications of this sort determined if one lived to see another day, and reveals how the mind developed a propensity to look for glaringly conspicuous characteristics in objects, which allows us to place them into one category or another.