Provide a general description of the learning experiences in which the STEM students were most successful. Additionally, generally describe the learning experiences that need improvement for greater student success.

 

Pinecrest Academy Charter (PAC) is a public charter school sponsored by the Miami-Dade County School District located in South Florida. PAC has a culturally diverse student population of 750 that make up various socioeconomic levels. In addition to the diversity, PAC services students with a wide variety of academic abilities. PAC currently has 118 students participating in the gifted program, 32 students in an inclusive special education program and 65 students in the English Language Learners program. PAC has been working diligently to ensure that STEM opportunities and experiences are available to all students. 

 

Our vision is empowering life-long learners to become innovative global leaders of tomorrow, we push our students for academic excellence through a STEM focused curriculum, but we also provide a school wide positive behavior support program (PBS program). This ensures we are helping our students become responsible, respectful, and safe citizens of our community. PAC has been recognized as a PBS Gold Model school.   

 

PAC has been a STEM focused school for the past 5 years, when we began the Launch program from PLTW and the VEX IQ Robotics program. Our teachers work collaboratively using the engineering design process to plan standard-based STEM lessons. We use Florida’s official source for standards called CPALMS (Curriculum Planning and Learning Management System) to plan STEM lessons that are embedded with technology and engineering. For example Model Eliciting Activities known as MEA’s, are extensive lessons used by our teachers. Our aim is to expose our students to real-world problems through these cross-curricular lessons. In the future we plan to have more such real-world based thematic lessons created by teachers for our students.

 

Students are able to explore their creativity particularly during PLTW projects and VEX IQ robotics lessons.  Students have the freedom to create their own design while choosing the materials they would use for the prototypes. During robotics, the students have opportunities to design their robot as they feel best meets the objective.  Since our lessons are standards based, there is a restriction to plan lessons that incorporate student preference for learning. Our goal is to be able to increase the student preference and choice making during STEM lessons. 

 

In addition to classroom successes, our students are afforded with the opportunity to expand their STEM experiences through extra-curricular activities. We have participated and excelled in numerous STEM competitions, which include SECME-Mouse Trap car (first place), Robot Dribbling abilities at the Miami Heat STEM Day competition (1st place), PAC cheer team - The Apex at Universal Orlando Resort - Intermediate Junior High (1st Place), Math & Science Bowl, Robotics- Qualified for World Championship for past 5 years.

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Provide examples of how the STEM educators and facilitators implement and sustain the core tenets of an effective and age-appropriate STEM curriculum.

 

To continue providing and improving the STEM program at PAC requires commitment and collaboration from teachers, parents, students and community partners. The STEM Committee comprises of teachers from each grade level who serve as STEM liaisons for their grades and meet on a regular basis to discuss and implement the STEM program at PAC. Parents get involved through our STEM presenters program, field trips, our PAC Garden, helping in class during STEM activities, assisting during Science Fair and STEM Family Night.

 

To ensure we are abreast with the current best practices we offer STEM based workshops at school and have all our teachers attend. Additionally, our faculty is encouraged to attend district offered STEM related professional development workshops too.

 

Teachers deliberately plan standard based lessons to incorporate technology and engineering across content areas to make these experiences exciting and continue learning for our elementary students. Our main aim is to provide a foundation to enable critical thinking and problem solving skills at an early age. It is our goal that this preparedness will help our students succeed well into secondary school and also helps them in choosing STEM fields they may be excited about.