Inquiry-based learning in STEM

St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School, Australia

Together we explored an active and sustainable process for thinking about STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) to help pupils make that tricky transition from primary to secondary school with greater confidence.

The first phase of our collaborative work addressed ‘Mapping the Pathways’ – addressing staff concerns about STEM teaching and understanding, coupled with the pupils’ desire to learn outside and amongst nature. Through coaching and observation, we identified some key insights including encouraging teachers to allow pupils to uncover knowledge and make connections by themselves, rather than telling them what to do.

During the second phase – ‘Connecting the Threads’ – we worked with teaching teams to plan STEM-focused units of inquiry into the school timetable and, once these had been designed, we facilitated fortnightly coaching sessions with staff. We also helped classes to create a ‘Project Nest’ to explore connections between different STEM projects and this resulted in a real-world problem to solve – how a wheelchair could be adapted to better suit the needs of one young wheelchair user.

The final phase of our work with St Teresa’s was ‘Designing Depth’ – a full-day design sprint to build a deeper understanding of the STEM disciplines and the connections between them. Turning teachers into learners, allowed us to address challenges together, through our Immersion, Synthesis, Ideation, Prototyping and Feedforward model.

“We have found that the kids have been driven and excited to do STEM and they seem to be passionate and engaged with this topic, which is brilliant! This has made it easy to run each STEM lesson and think where we got to next.”
Year 3 Teacher

“The students came up with some brilliant questions to ask. They have become really good at asking deeper, thinking questions that have a purpose and get them an answer that will assist the main, driving question.”
Year 3 Teacher

“This has allowed imaginations to run wild.”
Year 3 Teacher