Thursday, March 17th

 

3:50 pm EST to 4:00 pm EST
Welcome to the STEAM Leadership Conference 2022 at Georgia Tech! It's time to log into our virtual event.​ 

4:00 pm EST to 5:00 pm EST

District Support for STEM
Sally Creel and Andrea Wright
Breakout Room 1
 
A panel of metro district STEM directors and coordinators will discuss strategies for how districts support their schools towards STEM implementation and certification. With a focus on student success, the discussion will center around:
  • the role of school based leadership
  • getting buy-in from teachers
  • the importance of student engagement
  • the value of professional development
The panelists include Dr. Brene Bradley (Atlanta Public Schools), Dr. Sally Creel (Cobb County School District), Trina Reaves (Clayton County Public Schools), and Andrea Wright (DeKalb County School District).
 
Growing Sustainable Building Materials
Jeffrey Kitchen and David Kurt
Breakout Room 2
 
Many of the materials we use day to day come with a high environmental price. Most of our disposable materials ironically take hundreds of years to degrade and many of our building materials have massive carbon footprints. As we move into the third decade of this century there have been significant innovations in material science. K-12 teachers can help encourage students to find solutions to climate change. We have taken on this challenge by creating a project where students will design and build a sustainable garden space. Students will grow building materials and textiles for seating using mycelium, kombucha, and bioplastics. The design also incorporates alternate power sources to light the garden using soil/bacteria fuel cells. Using a combination of skill-share resources and open source videos any class can create these items. If the next generations are going to address the Earth's growing environmental concerns we must help students research and build solutions early.

5:00 pm EST to 5:30 pm EST

Truth-Telling and Eggshells: Rightful Presence in the STEAM Classroom
Justina Jackson and Katherine Boice
Breakout Room 1
 
Who belongs in a STEAM classroom? What does it mean for students to have a “rightful presence” in the classroom? How can teachers implement and assess STEAM lessons in a way that demonstrates student belonging in the classroom? What is the role of teachers in helping students understand and process racial, social, and economic inequities in the STEAM classroom, even when doing so feels like “walking on eggshells?”
 
In this session we’ll share a new framework - the Rightful Presence framework - that provides a guide for educators seeking to answer these questions. We’ll describe the tangible ways that the framework can be applied to the design and assessment of STEAM lessons and share the experiences of a group of K-12 STEAM educators as they engaged with this framework. We hope this presentation will help you reflect on how to center student lived experiences, while fostering new ideas for using instructional practice to promote rightful presence in STEAM classrooms.
 
Computer Science Education - Curriculum & Teacher Professional Development
Alba Gutierrez and Don Miller
Breakout Room 3
 
Computer Science knowledge is important as part of the 21st Century skills that students in the K-12 system need to learn as they are imperative to be successful in today’s world. The Georgia Legislature passed SB 108, which requires all schools to offer computer science by the 2024-2025 school year. Learn about teacher recruitment strategies, why it's critical to move beyond just access for all, and how we can ensure teacher and student success. K-12 Teachers can receive Computer Science Professional Development that provides them with the knowledge and tools to offer students a high-quality academic curriculum to expand students' learning and provide a competitive advantage for opportunities in their future fields of study and careers.

5:30 pm EST to 6:00 pm EST

The STEAM Connection to Social Emotional Learning
Tricia Patterson and John Creger
Breakout Room 1
 
STEAM design challenges are an innovative way for students to showcase their acquired attitudes, skills, and knowledge learned from counseling lessons. This session will inform participants of how to plan and develop units of counseling lessons that incorporate STEAM design challenges while utilizing ASCA Mindsets and Behaviors for student learning objectives. Participants will see how this planning process works and practical examples of how it has been implemented at our school. 
 
STEAM: The Unexpected Catalyst for Uplifting Silenced Voices
William Christopher Scandrett
Breakout Room 2
 
For years academia has served as a showcase for scholars to shine if they listened well, tested well, and were deemed overall exceptional inside of the classroom. However, often scholars with "diverse abilities" and minority groups were disenfranchised from the same level of success as their peers. Now, new research and observations have discovered that the implementation of STEAM content into educational curriculum correlates to a heightened classroom engagement of scholars with conditions such as ADHD, an increase of minority groups' test scores, and an increase in the general sense of belonging to most scholars. STEAM is the catalyst that we have been waiting for in education. 
 
Your Voice is Power: Make Beats.Learn Code.Promote Equity
Sabrina Grossman and Danyelle Larkin
Breakout Room 3
 
Pharrell Williams, Amazon Future Engineer, and Georgia Tech invite you to engage your students with Your Voice Is Power, a modular learning experience and competition that provides real-world exploration of the ways music, computer science, and entrepreneurship can be tools to advance equity. Using Georgia Tech’s EarSketch code to music platform, students will create remixes to Pharrell’s song Entrepreneur. This year, students can also use beats from Alicia Keys’ song Underdog and Khalid’s New Normal as part of their original compositions. Curriculum materials are provided to instructors at no cost, including all lesson plans and access to Teacher Training sessions. This session will show teachers how students can share their voice through computer science and music about issues that are important to them. 

6:00 pm EST to 6:30 pm EST

Open Q&A
Breakout Rooms 1, 2, & 3