With an ever-evolving world of knowledge, lead and directed strongly by technology, it is essential that primary school teachers are continuously updating their own personal avenues of learning (Nomad Press, 2015). The new 21st-century pedagogy area, known as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), is a curriculum area that encourages primary school teachers to re-examine their own personal learning techniques (Raju, 2017). There is often vague confusion as to how the new science curriculum differs from the old; explained simply, it is taking an outdated and often stagnate program and explicitly absorbing it within real life world frameworks (Raju, 2017). STEM also requires primary school teachers to re-evaluate and expand their teaching practices, their classroom layouts, lesson plans and learning objectives (Pfeiffer, 2017). The below information is a critical reflection written by a young STEM teacher, Alison Kettle; working in a brand new South-East Melbourne school of 326 students. The self-reflection will relate to her own thoughts on specific teaching and learning abilities, strengths, weaknesses, planning and lesson outcomes.   

My name is Alison Kettle. I am a 24-year-old STEM teacher who prides myself on planning, presenting, and delivering high quality STEM lessons. These lessons demand contemplation and specifically target children’s cognitive development through real world situations. I tailor my STEM lesson plans to appropriately fulfil student’s learning abilities, and throughout all science lessons, I encourage students to ask questions that regular classroom environments generally cannot support. My teaching approach within my STEM classroom is energetic and exuberant. I enjoy guiding student’s conversations into realms of genuine scientific exploration, territories of learning that require students to fully engage with their learning content and question different limits of possibilities. In order to create a safe STEM learning environment for all primary aged students, I spent the first two lessons of 2017 setting science safety standards, teacher expectations, classroom protocols and teaching online Internet safety. I established this as an essential aspect of my teaching, to ensure both my students' safety and my own personal high teaching standards.

It has been said, many times over, that as primary school teachers, we are also devoting ourselves to a career of becoming a lifelong learner (Department of Education and Training, 2015). To ensure that my modes of teaching are up to date I am constantly looking for new and innovative ways to extend my knowledge. Over the past few years I have completed this through Professional Development (PD) sessions, technology conferences, webinars, and currently I am expanding my pedagogy knowledge through further educational study. It is crucial that teachers push themselves constantly; not just for the improvement of themselves, but also to benefit the students that constantly walk in and out of their classrooms. As a primary school teacher, I find it particularly important to provide a positive example and be a confident role-model for my older students (year 5 and 6 specifically). I aim to do this by showing them that no matter how far you go in life, with hard work and dedication you can always go one step further. When reflecting on my learning, I believe my drive and determination to strive higher, is a strong aspect of my personal growth. Although some teachers are content to sit back and learn quietly, I am eager to stand up and drive 21st-century learning transformation using my ever-evolving teaching development.

As a STEM teacher, teaching year levels from foundation through to year six, I have two strengths that I rely heavily upon. The first, is the way in which I specifically engage my STEM students. As the STEM Education Research Centre [SERC] (2016) states, “It is a science teacher’s jobtoinstill a love of learning within their students as early as possible”. I work hard to ensure my students enjoy coming to their weekly STEM classes. It is extremely important to me that I succeed in this goal, as I had a negative science experience in secondary school that altered my attitude towards the subject area. I use my voice, tones and energy to portray and share lesson information with students. This shows the students through many avenues of body language and voice that my excitement to share science information is genuine. My second strength, I believe, is how I engage my students when they first enter the STEM classroom. I use Marsh’s (2010) approach to 21st century classrooms; using a post-it-note board to gauge the information they have retained from previous lessons. The children respond to this routine positively, as it is a two-minute reflection that they are accustomed to providing before the STEM lesson begins. As a graduate teacher, this provides a relatively raw assessment piece, from each separate home group that I teach.
 

With strengths also comes weaknesses. My largest weakness within my STEM classroom is the collection of assessment data. I generally find that within a 45-minute lesson there is very little time left to mark each individual student’s knowledge. This is an area of my teaching, in which I have been encouraged by my mentor, to specifically focus on throughout the next unit of work – Earth and Space Science. According to Parker and Lazaros (2014), “Assessment should be collected, analysed and used to extend student’s knowledge throughout every aspect of their schooling”. Having just completed the first round of primary school reports, I now understand the full extent and importance of having correct and consistent data to base reports upon. Although I mark my student’s books during the lesson, I am only now using an application known as Seesaw. This iPad application allows me to take constant photos of students’ work and update their profile with constant samples of work; I can also add notes and side comments as I analyse the student’s work. I believe the key to collecting data is to make is simple and accessible for teachers as they already have a lot of other things on their mind, like how they are going to plan every individual lesson for the week.

As a graduate teacher, I find that even though each lesson is planned down to the second, it is a very rare occurrence to follow it exactly. I still believe planners are an essential part of the career, regardless of the amount of years spent teaching. “Lesson planners enable teachers to clarify their thoughts, organise their lesson structure and begin the class with the end objective in mind”, as stated by Pfeiffer (2017). I am constantly assessing my curriculum plans and finding shortcuts to minimize planning hours; without compromising the specific detail and procedural content. My lesson plans are quite detailed in comparison to teachers with twenty years’ experience behind them, however, I find the extra detail to be comforting. It is not just individual lesson plans that I have, I also organise weekly overview planners, that stretch out to term and year planners. These different and varied planners help to break apart the Victorian Curriculum and demonstrate an in-depth understanding of student outcome expectations (Stevenson, 2012).

 Each lesson plan that I organise and write is created with the specific intent of providing students with a rich STEM experience (Holthouse, 2016). At the school that I am currently employed, we lead every lesson with a purpose statement. This is similar to a lesson WALT (we are learning to) sentence but it is written in 'kids speak' and clearly stated on the board. This is so that at any stage during the lesson another teacher, guest or student can identify exactly what is required as the educational outcome. Every lesson plan has one over aching objective but utilises a full range of curriculum links (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2013). These curriculum links are often taken from four of five curriculum areas to make the lesson inclusive and comprehensive. As an example, when planning a science lesson centered around biological science, I would add in native Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories (Kroff, 2017) as an opening lesson. This kind of cross-curricula approach exposes the students to multiple areas of learning in one short 45-minute lesson and allows the students to think outside of one centered thought process.

Looking over my specific teaching and learning abilities, strengths, weaknesses, planning and lesson outcomes as a graduate student, it is clear, I still have much to learn. However, before applying for my current teaching position, I volunteered over 700 hours within multiple primary schools across South-East Melbourne. This provided me with a fine-tuned opportunity to learn, grow, observe and evaluate on the positive aspects that I wanted to adopt as a teacher. These are hours that I spent learning from some of the best teachers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and unfortunately, I also met some negative and unenthusiastic teachers; all of which I learnt valuable lessons from. I believe that through critically reflecting on some of my current teaching protocols, it will result in constructive changes and amendments to my STEM lessons.