Pedagogical Partnerships in Primary and Secondary STEM Education

Abstract

It is crucial to provide students with a strong grounding in STEM education to continue to advance and contribute to the technological world. Many students develop negative attitudes toward school-focused STEM subjects, particularly science and mathematics, and often become disenchanted with these subjects as they progress through the compulsory years of school. The way in which these subjects are taught has been identified as a key element in engaging students. In the primary school context, many teachers have limited specialised knowledge in STEM areas and often lack confidence in teaching some of the content they are expected to teach while in the secondary school context, teachers typically have strong content knowledge but do not necessarily employ effective teaching strategies or represent the content in abstract ways and often fail to make cross-curricular links. This chapter reports on a novel approach to STEM education professional learning, used as part of a school-based research project. The approach brought together primary and secondary school teachers to collaboratively program and team-teach science, resulting in reported improvements in the content knowledge and self-efficacy for the primary school teachers, and enhanced pedagogical knowledge for the secondary school teachers.