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Author: Eric Magers

  • Mental Health Services Should be Required in Schools

    Mental Health Services Should be Required in Schools

    Mental health issues are sky-rocketing in the world and with this spike come tremendous tragedies. Students these days are labeled as the “anxious generation”, they stress about anything and everything. Will this be on the test? Did I forget to bring a calculator? Will I get too cold if I sit under the window? Why does anything matter? What will I eat in the cafeteria? Students’ minds are being ambushed by anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD and eating disorders. It’s causing not only a decline in their academic performance, but their overall well-being as well.

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    Who’s Struggling?

    Too many people are facing internal battles everyday and have no outlet available for them to seek help. This silent suffering only exacerbates their anxiety, loneliness, and rationalization process, leading to life altering and/or threatening conditions. Sadly, children have become the predominant victims of mental health deterioration. In fact, 1 in 10 people suffer from some type of mental health issue, while 1 in 5 children have a diagnosable mental health related issue. This means that roughly 20% of young students are facing real uphill battles to do well in school. They are juggling their challenging academics, chaotic extracurricular activities, stressful social lives and their emotional stability. Students these days are hanging on by a thread and schools are one of the best places to protect the needs of students.

    Numbers Don’t Lie

    Unfortunately, 50% of mental health issues arise by the time someone is 14 years old and 75% of all of them occur by the time someone is 24. Many children these days struggle to make it through their childhood without being plagued by mental health obstacles. To make it even more alarming, a staggering 67% of people ages 18 to 24 suffering with anxiety and/or depression do not seek psychological help. It is self-evident that if a person is not in the right state of mind then learning becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible. A third of students have expressed that the negative condition of their mental health is causing them to fail in school. News flash: students need help and they need it now.

    How Are We Just Noticing?

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    Many students suffering with a mental illness do not initially recognize what and how they are being affected. Mental health problems often gradually seep into someone’s life and do not appear overnight. This is also why many parents fail to notice the symptoms of their child’s mental illness. Only 7% of college parents reported that their child was or is struggling with mental health issues, however due to previous statistics stated, that is obviously not representative of reality. Our society is just becoming more “woke” about the warning signs of mental health, so there’s a lot that we still have to learn.

    Signs Someone is Struggling

    People who struggle with mental health issues are affected in various ways. Some people are dramatically affected by their internal obstacles, while some people’s mental health issues grow at a slower rate and are more difficult to pinpoint. However, five very common signs that someone is experiencing a toll on their mental health are if they struggle with constant fatigue, physical pain, perfectionism, lack of emotion and avoidance.

    Students Need Resources

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    It should be no surprise to anyone that a decline in a student’s mental health can directly result in a decline in their learning and achievement in school. Mental health needs to be a student’s number one concern, even more so than their success in the classroom. Therefore, schools should provide more mental health resources (counselors, therapists, psychologists, and nurses) for their students in order to promote and normalize the act of getting help and talking about mental health. By providing resources for students in schools, this gives them a convenient outlet to seek help, while simultaneously encouraging many of the staff to be on higher alert of the warning signs of mental illnesses.

    Schools need to emphasize to their students that mental health is a priority and not something that should be easily dismissed. It should always come first. If schools have more mental health resources then this will show students how seriously their mental health should be taken. Schools are slowly becoming better at providing more accessible help to their students, but they have a long way to go. The sooner that schools provide their students with easy access to counselors, therapists, and nurses then the better off students will be.

    Written by: Olivia Fitzgerald

    Your NSTEM Journey Begins Here!

  • A Conversation with a College Professor

    A Conversation with a College Professor

    This conversation is between Chelsea Kowal and her former college advisor, Dr. Julie Hasenwinkel, who is Professor and Chair of the Biomedical and Chemical Engineering departments at Syracuse University.

    Chelsea: What are 5-10 ways that you have found to nurture students while remaining professional?

    Dr. Hasenwinkel: I actively try to get to know my students and learn about their interests and goals and I let them get to know me and help them understand that I am a real person who experiences stress and challenges too. I send students information about opportunities that are a good fit for them. I encourage students to apply for things or pursue particular paths that align with their interests and goals. I advise students formally and informally to educate them about student success. I help students to network with other professionals on campus and in their field. I try to be positive and encouraging to students when they are struggling.

    Chelsea: What are some ways that you keep students engaged in STEM fields, especially women?

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    Dr. Hasenwinkel: The place where I probably have the biggest impact is in the classroom with the students that I teach, where I try to get them interested in the material by using real world problems and examples.  But beyond that, I try to help students think about and pursue opportunities for engagement outside of the classroom.  Science and engineering come to life in the research lab, or in a cool design project, or at an internship.  This is where students get to translate their foundational knowledge from their classes into meaningful real world experiences.  Those experiences can be tremendously formative in terms of a student’s future career so I really try to push students to take advantage of every opportunity that they can get to explore before they graduate.

    Chelsea: Did you face any adversity being a female engineer? If so, how did you get through it? What are some ways that it’s gotten easier (or harder) for women in STEM fields?

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    Dr. Hasenwinkel: I never felt like I was overtly discriminated against but I’d say my biggest challenge was the lack of peer support early in my career as a faculty member.  When I started my faculty position there were very few women professors in my college and they were all much older than me.  None of them had children while on the tenure-track, like I did, and none of them had children at home anymore so it was hard for me to relate to them as peers.  I didn’t have a strong peer network in academia outside of my institution because most of my friends had gone to work in industry.  I struggled with being ‘the only’ and I felt tremendous pressure to succeed, both because I wanted to be successful and because I didn’t want people to think that I couldn’t be successful because I was a woman who chose to also have a family.  I also felt like I had to do things ‘on my own’ because people would think less of me if I asked for help.  That was a big mistake.  I should have asked for mentorship, even when no one was reaching out to me to offer it.  I just didn’t know because I was naïve and I didn’t really have trusted role models that I could go to for help. Things have changed so much in the past twenty years.  Now I have many more female colleagues and most of them have young children.  There is much more formal and informal peer support at my institution and I’ve been able to participate in programs outside of my institution, which has helped me to build robust peer networks.  Now I am in a position in my career where I can lead in these areas and make a difference for those who come after me, by continuing to push for equitable policies and practices and by mentoring junior faculty.

    Chelsea: As a university STEM professor and a parent, what are some creative ways that you get your kids interested in STEM?

    Dr. Hasenwinkel: This is a really simple but impactful thing (I think)…I always answered my kid’s questions.  If you’ve ever spent time with young children you know that they ask a lot of questions.  They are far more inquisitive than high school or college students, at least in what they are willing to ask out loud.  It’s easy to be dismissive of their questions because it can be draining.  But when my kids asked questions I always tried to answer them on their level.  And if I didn’t know the answer I would tell them that and then we would figure it out together (thank you Google!).  It’s really not that different from teaching college students, where you try to instill a sense of curiosity and motivation to ask good questions, followed by a drive to find and understand the answer.  My kids took that curiosity and pursued enriching extracurricular STEM activities in school, like Science Olympiad.  I have two college aged children now.  One is pursuing his degree in Mechanical Engineering and the other in International Relations.  They didn’t both end up in STEM but they both still ask good questions!

    Written By: Chelsea Kowal

    Your NSTEM Journey Begins Here!

  • How to Lead Your Elementary Students Through the Engineering Design Process

    How to Lead Your Elementary Students Through the Engineering Design Process

    Do you find it difficult to introduce a confusing process to elementary students? The engineering design process is difficult to introduce to elementary students due to its complexity. Here are a few ways that the engineering design process can be introduced to elementary students.

    Photo by Daria Nepriakhina

    The Design Process Steps

    The engineering design process has six steps. The first step in the engineering design process is  to ask the student to identify the problem. Imagine is the second step of the process, where the student is tasked with thinking about solutions to the problem and researching ways to solve that problem. Planning is the third step in the engineering design process. This step has students narrow their list of ideas to about three and begin to make their final decision and sketches of that design. Create is the fourth step in the process where students create a model that fits with their design from the planning step. Test is the fifth step. This is where the students collect data and test the design, then analyze the data and the strengths and weaknesses of the design. Improvement is the final step where students reflect on their results to make their design better. 

    How to Help Students with the Design Process

    The students should always be engaged with the material. Introduce the engineering design process to the students by giving them examples or a video that they can watch. NASA has an introduction video that explains the engineering design process and videos for each step of the process. NASA also has activity guides to assist teachers in teaching the process to students for grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8. Additionally, there are numerous videos that are online that teachers can show to the students to help them understand the engineering design process. Teach Engineering has a whole curriculum that can help teachers when teaching the engineering design process.

    Photo by Clayton Robbins

    Encourage the students to use the engineering design process with the use of projects. There are sources for teachers to use to access project ideas. Students can use the engineering design process to build a balloon car. Projects like these will help students learn and experience what it is like to use this process as a way of thinking. Another project that students can do would be the egg drop project. This project has students use the engineering design process to build a device to prevent the egg from breaking when it is dropped. Students would need raw eggs, egg cartons,  packing, recyclable materials, cardboard, cotton balls, straws, pipe cleaners, wooden skewers, rubber bands, string and plastic bags if they want parachutes, and test eggs which could be plastic eggs or hard-boiled eggs. Once students have built their design, the design will need to be dropped from a high location. There are plenty of examples of projects that teachers can use in their classroom to help the students understand the engineering design process. 

    Written by Lee Metoyer

    Your NSTEM Journey Begins Here!

  • Ways to Use Breakout Rooms in the Zoom Classroom

    Ways to Use Breakout Rooms in the Zoom Classroom

    Zoom is a wonderful application that allows you to converse with people all around the world. During the  pandemic, Zoom has brought people together in more ways than one. If you are a teacher, there is a method of breaking the virtual Zoom classroom into smaller groups for more intimate discussions.

    Photo by Iyus Sugiharto

    Breakout rooms in Zoom allow the teacher to break the classroom into smaller groups, as they do in real life in the real classroom. For example, if the class has 24 students, the teacher could break the class into 4 groups of 6 students, or 6 groups of 4 students, whichever is better.

    Before you work with Breakout rooms, it is important to understand a few things about them.

    Before you break the students into groups, create a clear task that they have to complete when in the breakout rooms, such as brainstorming or answering a certain set of questions.

    You also want to be mindful of the amount of time you give the students to brainstorm or answer the set of questions. Knowing how many students are in each breakout room is incredibly important when coming up with the amount of time it will take to complete the tasks.

    If the group needs to take notes, there are different ways that the students can take notes, whether on a Google doc or handwritten notes. As the teacher, you should tell the students or teach them how to take notes and define a role as note taker to at least one person in each breakout room.

    You should try to keep the groups the same or similar each time so the students begin to feel a connection with each other and learn to collaborate as a team. If the breakout rooms change all the time, it can be confusing to the students. Remind your students to encourage each other and help support each other throughout the process.

    Photo by Beci Harmony

    As the host of the Zoom meeting, you can monitor all the breakout rooms and go in and out of them as you please. Make sure that you become familiar with this process so that you can make sure that each breakout room is working as effectively and efficiently as possible. If you have a Teacher’s Assistant (TA), make sure that they can also weave in and out of the groups to facilitate the discussion.

    There is an important option in the breakout room that says “Ask for help.” This button notifies the host that the student or students have a question and require help. Make sure that your students know about this option before separating into breakout rooms.

    One amazing option that Zoom has is the option to share screens, in which, with the click of a button, all of the students in the breakout room can see the screen of the student who wants to share their screen. This can be very useful when taking notes, as all of the students can be on the same page, and each student in the breakout room can see the notes that are being typed.

    Another important option in Zoom is the ability to set up specific groups ahead of time. If you know that two students really do not get along, you can make sure that they are not assigned to the same group. In the same vein, if two students get along really well, maybe you can assign them to the same group.

    For more information, please check out the following website: Successful Breakout Rooms Zoom

    Written by Chelsea Kowal

    Your NSTEM Journey Begins Here!

  • Failing Forward: Implementing the Growth Mindset in College Classrooms

    Failing Forward: Implementing the Growth Mindset in College Classrooms

    Not-So-Humble Beginnings

    In high school, I was the valedictorian of my class. I will admit I reveled in the title quite a bit, given I never studied very hard. I was even more exultant after being admitted to UCLA, my top college choice. Little did I know, I was in for a rude yet necessary awakening. 

    A word of advice to my incoming college freshman with superiority complexes: I hate to break it to you, but the university you attend will have students equally intelligent, accomplished, and competitive as you are. Trust me. I’ve learned that the hard way. Within the first few weeks of my first quarter, I contemplated dropping several of my classes, experienced imposter syndrome, and cried countless times over grades. I felt inferior to my peers who thrived in subjects I struggled with and felt insecure when I learned of the prestigious internships and leadership positions they secured. I was the same student I was in high school, yet I now struggled with school work. Had I doomed myself by attending a prestigious university? 

    One day, post-mental breakdown over a chemistry assignment, I met a neighboring classmate for lunch to discuss studying strategies for our upcoming midterm. After learning she had set the curve for our last exam, I revealed how hopeless I felt and expressed my belief that my fate was only to become a failure. To reassure me, she told me the untold story of her success in a class where most students were deemed unsuccessful, myself included. 

    The Chemistry of Success 

    Photo by Bree Evans

    In high school, this classmate had struggled with chemistry in her sophomore year. Stoichiometry gave her headaches, while thermodynamics made her cry, and equilibrium caused her to cringe. Yet, like me, she desperately wanted to go to UCLA. Unlike me, this classmate had developed what is known as a “growth mindset.” Despite her initial poor performances in the class, she persevered. Those with growth mindsets permanently improve their intelligence and ability to learn new skills through hard work, training, and perseverance. As opposed to myself, I had developed a “fixed mindset,” a mindset that assumes our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static, meaning we can’t change in any meaningful way. She contended that my academic performance was attributed to the fact that I didn’t view failure as a lesson, rather a reflection of my self-worth. The lack of acknowledgment and recognition I gave the mistakes I made on assignments and tests was why I continuously repeated them. I needed to reject my high school notion of being naturally gifted. Instead, I needed to accept the idea that my intelligence was not innate, and there was always room to improve. 

    I went home that day entertaining her proposition and decided to follow her advice. The following week, I called her to discover we had set the curve for our chemistry midterm. 

    Dismantling the College Campus Complex 

    In 2007, Stanford psychology Professor Carol Dweck coined the term growth mindset. A growth mindset describes people who believe that their success depends on time and effort. Furthermore, they embrace challenges, persist through obstacles, learn from criticism, and seek out inspiration in others’ successes. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart, and they put more energy into learning. Professors and college students should embrace the concept of maintaining a growth mindset instead of worrying about how those around them might react to their shortcomings. By promoting this mentality, college students’ mental health statuses, academic performances, and relationships amongst one another would improve dramatically. With the lack of competition and reassurance guaranteed by implementing a universal growth mindset on college campuses, we could foster an upcoming generation of revolutionary innovation. 

    Whether you are an incoming college freshman, a high school freshman, or maybe even my chemistry professor, understanding the importance of developing a growth mindset impacts not only an individual’s academic performance but all aspects of their life. Failure and setbacks are inevitable and can be frustrating, but your mindset will determine whether you choose to avoid the challenge or embrace it and grow.

    Written by Alexandra Sugatan

    Your NSTEM Journey Begins Here!

  • Four Lesson Plans for Middle School Math

    Four Lesson Plans for Middle School Math

    These past couple school years have thrown many curve balls. From virtual learning to social distancing regulations and unexpected school closures, teachers’ plates are abundantly full. This article aims to lift some of the weight off of educators’ shoulders by providing four lesson plans for middle school math classes. All can be adapted to an online format and will engage your students and accelerate their learning!

    Basic and Straightforward Lesson Plan With High Student Involvement

    Photo by AbsolutVision

    • Begin with a “Do Now”—a low-stakes question to warm up students’ brains and reinforce a recently-learned skill. This website has many great ideas for short, grade-specific problems and worksheets. Depending on your class, it may be wise to have students hand these in for grading to motivate them to do some light studying prior to each class. Perhaps invite a student to come up to the board and present their approach to the class. If virtual, have a student upload a picture of their work or let them use the drawing feature many video conferencing applications have in order to show their thinking.
    • Following the theme of student presentations, randomly select students to present their answers to the homework. Encouraging students to walk through and explain their process forces them to think critically about their approach and the topics involved. Allow students to pose questions or offer other methods. Step in when necessary, but be sure to give students the space to toy with their ideas too.
    • Synthesize the key topics and methods that appeared in the homework. Enlist the students’ help to create a running list of the material covered in the unit. Students can copy these lists to use as a studying “checklist” prior to assessments. Ask which ideas are proving to be more difficult to grasp and perhaps assign supplemental work that hones in on these skills.
    • Now that the students have done most of the leading for this class period, it’s time for you, the teacher, to step in and speak directly to the class. If there is new material to cover or explain, spend a few minutes outlining it and answering questions. This point in the class is a great time to give a short preview to students about what their classwork and homework will cover.
    • Split students into groups or “breakout rooms” and give them a worksheet or problem set to work on collectively. Bounce between each group to check on their progress and assess which groups are moving more slowly. If students do not complete their work, consider whether you want it to be added to the homework or to be finished next class period.

    Game Day

    Photo by AbsolutVision

    • Begin by splitting students up into two teams. Line them up single-file facing the board. If remote, do not use breakout rooms. Have each group select their first contestant. Read or project a math problem or question that should not take more than 45 seconds to solve. Make sure everyone is on mute if you are remote. The first student to correctly complete the problem earns a point for their team. Continue this mini “contest” for as long as you’d like or until a team reaches a certain number of points. Be sure every student has a chance to participate.
    • A spin-off of this game is to use the same two-team structure and fill a hat with a variety of math concepts from their recent units. If you are teaching virtually, consider entering the topics into a random generator beforehand, or randomly assign them to students. Have a student from one team pick from the hat and briefly explain the concept. If they are correct, their team gains a point. Then repeat the same for the opposing team. Consider adding a “phone a friend” option to engage more students and to give each team a chance to earn partial points even if the initial student did not correctly explain the concept.
    • If you have a larger class, it may be better to play a game like “Jeopardy”, which allows for multiple teams. Begin by splitting the class into as many teams as needed (ideally with around three students per team). Have students choose their topic and point value and give them a set amount of time to produce an answer as a group. Allow other teams to “steal” for optimal student involvement. If virtual, use breakout rooms and submit the question to the chat so that teams can work independently of one another. This game requires a larger amount of preparation beforehand, but is a huge pay-off when you see how much your students enjoy it.
    • Debrief with your students at the end of the games to highlight the topics that routinely came up. Also emphasize the ones that prove to be tricky for much of the class. Consider rewarding winning teams with extra points on the next quiz or test!

    Pre-Assessment Class to Prepare Students

    • Ask students to prepare a quiz before this class period. The quizzes should cover material that is fair-game for the upcoming assessment and should only take 10-15 minutes. Make sure they create an answer key too. Randomly pair them up and ask them to exchange quizzes with their partner. If remote, students can “share” their document with each other. Have students grade the quizzes they took using their classmate’s answer key. This activity accomplishes two goals: forcing students to deeply consider what will be on the assessment, and gain valuable practice which will calm their nerves and help them to identify the areas where they need additional practice.
    • Expand on the running topic list you may have created from other classes. Perhaps list relevant problems associated with each key idea and create bullet points that succinctly describe the concept. If there are problem types that routinely show up, give an example of how to complete it (for example, completing the square). By the end of this exercise, you will have formed a mini study guide that students can copy and reference when studying.
    • To engage students further, assign students to make a “pamphlet” detailing the test material. They can divide a paper into thirds and list the topics along with their relevance, problem examples, and connections to other topics. Encourage them to add color and diagrams in order to increase the fun and make the project more accessible for visual learners.

    Hands-On Activities

    • Although these activities may be better in a classroom setting, they can all be adapted for virtual learning. If students are learning about the concept of slope, assign them to find the slope of stairs in your school or in their home. Ask them to consider what a good slope would be for a set of stairs and what a poor slope would be. 
    • For a yummy assignment, give students a basic recipe but replace all the measurements with math expressions. For example: add ½ x ¾ cups of brown sugar. This project will not only be a huge hit, but students can practice using fractions and see their practical use. 
    • If students are learning about pie charts and percentages, have the students create a pie chart detailing the activities of their day. For example: 33.3% sleeping, 20% playing, etc. Make sure they add a key and color code the pie sectors. 
    • If students are learning about lines and graphs in general, ask them to graph a scenario. Perhaps they choose to create a line graph that plots a car’s distance vs. time or the level of bathtub water as someone fills up the tub, gets in, and drains it. The possibilities are truly endless so encourage the class to get creative. Give them space to share their products with their classmates.

    Written by Lucy Reid

    Your NSTEM Journey Begins Here!