Conceptualization of STEAM Education in the Elementary Classroom

Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) education is an instructional approach to education in which students demonstrate creative approaches in experiential, inquiry-based learning within the STEM disciplines. Despite the national focus on STEAM education, there exists considerable uncertainty as to what constitutes STEAM education and how classroom educators make sense of their conceptualization of STEAM in their classroom within the state of Georgia. The method of conceptualization is the internal processing of thoughts that produce new ideas or knowledge. This descriptive case study offers thoughtful new insights on how educators in a STEAM-certified elementary school in a school district located in Georgia conceptualize STEAM education. The study employed three instruments to gain authentic insight into participants’ conceptualizations of STEAM education in their elementary classroom settings. The data from this descriptive case study suggest STEAM education is a distinctively different approach to instruction beneficial for student success in the 21st-century landscape. The data indicated STEAM education is socially constructed and most effectively implemented in a transdisciplinary manner. This descriptive case study findings offers intersubjective knowledge for enhanced collective knowledge of STEAM in the elementary classroom setting and advances the understanding that one, singular conceptualization of STEAM implementation in the classroom setting may not be an appropriate goal or target. Instead, the basic tenets of culture, change, and context need to be considered on an individual basis if STEAM education continues to progress as a widely used curricular approach for student success in the 21st century landscape

We Don’t Need Another Hero: Understanding Team Learning Processes within the Senior Leadership Teams of Middle Atlantic Universities

The twin forces of complexity and change have created a volatile environment for higher education institutions. For many institutions, strategic institutional change has become an imperative, not a choice. These new demands have escalated the complexity of institutional leadership and changed the demands on the college and university presidency. Strategic responsibilities have expanded beyond the presidency in new ways, creating increased reliance by presidents on their senior leadership teams. In light of the key influence of senior leadership teams on strategic institutional change, a deeper investigation of these teams is critical for the sector’s positive transformation. This qualitative study of presidents and senior leadership teams at five Middle Atlantic higher education institutions sought to understand how presidents and their senior leadership team members work and learn together. The study was especially focused on the ways presidents and senior leadership team members described their roles, interactions between team members, and the practices and beliefs that inhibit or enable team learning. Using shared leadership, team learning, and sensemaking literature coupled with the Dechant, Marsick, and Kasl (1993) model of team learning as a foundation, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews and administered an excerpt of the Dechant and Marsick (1993) Team Learning Survey. The study yielded insights that could be valuable to those who lead or are members of higher education senior leadership teams and those that educate, consult, and advise senior leadership teams in college and university settings. While strategic planning and long-term thinking were identified as key roles for senior leadership teams, team interactions were largely defined by institutional management activities, including information sharing, determining ownership and key decision makers, problem solving, and issue resolution. In particular, student affairs and finance officers reported fragmented learning processes and fixed views of their functional expertise. Senior leadership teams were primarily engaged in learning processes to support complex problem solving. To execute strategic change in higher education, intentionally cultivated informal learning practices that encourage explicit reflection on action coupled with deeper forms of relationship building between team members are needed. These activities require clear endorsement and consistent support by the institutional president

“Like a Whole Thing”: Dialogic Sensemaking in One Sixth Grade Classroom

This qualitative study used a constructivist approach to better understand how students in one sixth grade classroom participate in dialogic discussions while making sense of texts. Participants in the study attended a suburban, public, high-performing middle school in Pennsylvania. Drawing on Sociocultural Learning Theory and Transactional Reading Theory, the researcher observed one English Language Arts class. Nine students participated in five reading events over a period of two months. Data collection, informed by linguistic ethnographic methods, included audio recordings, transcriptions of reading events, fieldnotes, and transcriptions of one on one and small group interviews. In Vivo coding of the interview data helped to honor the voices of the participants, while initial coding of the dialogue led to the development of four themes centering on the talk moves students made when making sense of texts through dialogue: affirming ideas, testing ideas, teaching ideas, and holding onto ideas. Focusing on the perspectives of the students participating in the dialogue, the study revealed specific instructional frames and practices such as carefully constructing questions, providing access to discussion norms and sentence starters, and providing frequent opportunities to engage in dialogue, that enhance the ethos of the classroom community. The classroom culture was further enhanced by an understanding of how to engage in collaborative discussion and a sense of value in the group. The discussion includes implications for future educational practice based on these key findings

Maximizing Influence and Sensesight: A Grounded Theory Study of How Executives Make Sense and Lead in Complexity

U.S. health care reform is a significant driver of complexity in healthcare organizations. The highly regulated directive began with the Affordable Care Act of 2008 and seeks to improve value of patient care by reducing costs and improving quality. However, to implement the required changes, executives must continue daily operations while they dismantle and reassemble core clinical and financial processes of the organization. The shift toward value exacerbates complexity in the already complicated and high stakes healthcare field. Complexity challenges improvement efforts and negatively impacts quality of care. Complexity also affects how executives make sense and lead. For success, executive leaders must understand the environment and maximize their influence as they balance operational logistics and cultural aspects of change. Cognitive and social-cognitive processes, such as sensemaking and sensegiving, play a pivotal role in how the leader calibrates a direction and influences the organization. This qualitative constructivist grounded theory study of 17 executive leaders explains the processes executives used to make sense and maximize influence in complex circumstances. The major finding in this study theorizes how sensesight, or insight emerging from sensemaking about sensegiving, maximizes influence during situational demands. The findings provide a theoretical model illustrating the processes and could benefit executives attempting to lead in complexity

An Exploratory Study on How Math Stories Engage Young Learners in Mathematical Sense-Making

This is an exploratory study of how pedagogy in the form of math stories, shapes young learners’ perceptions, motivations, and sense-making of math concepts. The research is presented in an exploratory documentary, with audio-video data collected through the iPhone. The pilot test of story-driven math learning solutions was conducted by two teachers with eight first grade children from diverse backgrounds in an afterschool program. This study also includes interviews of the teachers, educational leaders and specialists in primary school curricula, children’s literature, and math education. The results of the pilot validated the efficacy of story-driven math learning solutions for mathematical sensemaking and reasoning. By helping the characters students were empowered as young mathematicians. They were motivated and engaged in mathematical modeling, for example, building equations deepened understanding from concrete problems to abstract concepts. The teachers observed the accelerated rate of students’ learning through stories, games, and multimodal activities shaped by a creative, socially interactive, and culturally responsive pedagogy not typically used in their math classes

Learning through business unit failure: a study of individuals and mid-level managers

Research on business failure focuses primarily on entrepreneurs and largely ignores individuals and mid-level managers who comprise most corporate populations. This study aimed to mitigate this gap by exploring how 15 individuals and mid-level managers working in a Fortune 50 technology company experienced failure and how their beliefs impacted their experience and learnings. Qualitative interview data were analyzed using a schema from the literature. The results suggested that emotional regulation, belief in personal agency, and separation of self from work supported learning and positive outcomes. Future research would create deeper insights into the social impacts on emotions and sensemaking and the importance of dynamics such as relative power

Strategies to influence meaning creation to address resistance in a change initiative

Organizational change has been a constant and essential aspect of human societies for centuries, driving innovation and adaptability. However, despite the abundance of models and content on managing change, organizations still struggle to implement and sustain effective transformations. This research aims to address this challenge by exploring strategies to create meaning and address resistance during transformational change. The research will employ a qualitative approach, conducting 15 interviews to capture participants\u27 experiences and strategies in influencing meaning creation during change initiatives. The data collected will be transcribed, coded, categorized, and analyzed for themes, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the strategies employed. The findings provide insights into the strategies employed to effectively influence meaning creation in a change initiative and highlight the importance of being agile, understanding the impacted audience, utilizing storytelling, tailoring change rollouts, building a diverse community of influencers, and providing choice

Savouring Life: The Leader's Journey to Health and Effectiveness

‘Savouring Life’ was a participatory action research (PAR) study within a complex living system—the Churches of Christ in New South Wales (NSW). One hundred and eight leaders participated in collaborative qualitative research aiming to help the organisation improve professional practice in the development of healthy and effective leaders. Structured conversations, storytelling and other participatory techniques were used to elicit the leaders’ own tacit knowledge to better understand the systemic health issues that they face. Viewing the organisation through complex living systems was found to be a useful framework to explore four cycles of action research inquiry. An aspirational state of ‘optimal functioning’ was identified to assist a shift in leadership practice that emphasises the salutogenic (focus on health and wellness) rather than merely responding to the pathogenic (focus on disease and disorder). Participants co-generated their own theories of transformation, making tacit knowledge explicit through the development of six mapping tools that were designed to share newly found knowledge throughout the organisation. PAR effectively influenced both learning and change, contributing to the launch of three system-wide action interventions: (1) The Centre for Wellness, (2) The Leaders Care Network and (3) Mentoring Training. The result is a holistic approach to leadership development designed to improve the health and effectiveness of leaders across the organisation

Toward Theoretical Techniques for Measuring the Use of Human Effort in Visual Analytic Systems

Visual analytic systems have long relied on user studies and standard datasets to demonstrate advances to the state of the art, as well as to illustrate the efficiency of solutions to domain-specific challenges. This approach has enabled some important comparisons between systems, but unfortunately the narrow scope required to facilitate these comparisons has prevented many of these lessons from being generalized to new areas. At the same time, advanced visual analytic systems have made increasing use of human-machine collaboration to solve problems not tractable by machine computation alone. To continue to make progress in modeling user tasks in these hybrid visual analytic systems, we must strive to gain insight into what makes certain tasks more complex than others. This will require the development of mechanisms for describing the balance to be struck between machine and human strengths with respect to analytical tasks and workload. In this paper, we argue for the necessity of theoretical tools for reasoning about such balance in visual analytic systems and demonstrate the utility of the Human Oracle Model for this purpose in the context of sensemaking in visual analytics. Additionally, we make use of the Human Oracle Model to guide the development of a new system through a case study in the domain of cybersecurity

Continuous Improvement Leadership in Applied Research

The purpose of this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) is to assist leaders in Ontario colleges in understanding the barriers and challenges of engaging faculty to enact applied research practices. Undergirding this OIP is social cognition theory and the analytical discipline of improvement science theory. Taken together, these theories align with systems thinking and are a step towards a holistic understanding of the dynamics of a college learning culture. Underpinned by a set of simple principles including improving through communication, learning through collaboration, and changing through coordination, a continuous improvement (CI) leadership approach, which combines servant (Greenleaf, 1977), team (Kogler Hill, 2019), and adaptive (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002) attributes, is utilized to address this problem of practice. To lead the change process, the CI leadership approach provides positive opportunities to engage with faculty by building relationships, social capital and professional capital, for deeper and more lasting change. The premise of this OIP is that developing a network improvement committee is an opportunity to engage, accelerate learning, and develop relationships with faculty. This OIP’s change management, implementation, and communication plan takes an action-research and ethics-based approach. Different perspectives inform this approach, including Lewin’s (1947) 3-Step Change Process and the Carnegie Foundation’s Six Core Principles of Improvement Framework (Bryk, 2015). Once implemented, it is anticipated that the outcomes of this OIP will contribute to a common language for applied research that increases the likelihood of influencing faculty engagement. Stronger linkages between teaching and applied research are consistent with continuous improvement in learning and collective accountability to meet the expectations of a competitive global market, strategically aligned with economic and community impact priorities