STEM Strategies Lesson Plan Reflection – Egg Drop Project

Since the first day we stepped foot into a classroom or teacher preparation class, we were taught how to plan lessons. Beginning with an anticipatory set and concluding with some form of assessment, whether it is formally or informally implemented. Looking at planning lessons in a different way was a bit foreign, but very informative and definitely more useful. When focusing on STEM strategies throughout our lesson, we are preparing our students for situations that may occur in the field and, at the same time, challenging them in ways that will build those highly important critical thinking skills.

The 5 E’s Strategy made it helpful to focus on the details we want our students to learn, without losing the big picture and main concepts. Making sure our students are engaged throughout the lesson helped us plan activities that built upon prior knowledge. It is critical to keep our students’ young minds constantly engaged or else face the consequences of unfocused and bored adolescents. When planning a lesson in this manner, I tried desperately to transition between each stage of the lesson as seamlessly as possible by constantly building on prior knowledge.

The most challenging issue with implementing this lesson was trying to determine how I would modify and differentiate the assessment for my RSP and English Language Learners. I thought of ways to modify the assessment by providing additional materials for each student to work with. Here was the assessment for each group of students:

Using only 15 straws, 20 Popsicle sticks, 50 cm of string, a lunch-sized paper bag, and a meter of tape, design and construct a project that will safely land an uncooked egg when dropped from a height of 5 meters. Calculating the average speed of the projects in your class and graphing the results against success or failure, make a correlation, if any, between average speed and success/failure rates.

The challenge here was how to limit the amount of resources available for my diverse students. Do I give them an unlimited supply of straws or sticks? Is giving them a larger sized paper bag enough? How much, if any, extra tape and string do I allow? In the years past, I allowed all of the above for my diverse students, and to my surprise the percentage of successful projects (egg did not break), was similar to their mainstreamed counterparts. Is that an indication to continue these modifications?

Although I still have a lot of questions about differentiation, using this style of lesson planning was beneficial for several reasons. First, it helped me focus on the “lasting knowledge” each student should walk away with. The students needed to master certain skills and concepts to be successful at this project. Second, STEM strategies are used in real-world experiences. The introduction and use of these skills were emphasized, including collaboration and communication throughout the entire process. Lastly, it taught me to check for understanding at various points in the lesson and re-teach concepts if necessary. One of the worst mistakes I have made in the past was to assume that every student understood what was being taught and asked of them. It was not until the end of the unit that I realized some students did not “get it.” This is not only frustrating and heart breaking for us as educators, but devastating to those students in our classrooms.