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STEAM

The Howard School began a concentrated STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) curriculum integration initiative in 2015, funded by a generous three-year grant from The Goizueta Foundation. With a heightened focus on arts integration, as well as cross-curricular and cross-divisional teaching, our students engage with traditional STEM content in novel ways that value their individual perspective and strengths while fostering 21st century skills. STEAM at The Howard School transforms learning into the active, experiential, and personal process of sense making that it is truly meant to be.

The STEAM curriculum is one of the many ways we are preparing students with the diverse array of lifelong learning skills they will need as workers in this rapidly advancing and continually evolving 21st century.

 

Teacher showing student how to fly a rubber band powered plane
Multiple students playing indoors using plastic blocks to create walls
Student wearing safety googles and holding a hammer with a block of wood and nails in front of them
Art piece on wall with flying triangle butterflies coming out of students head
Student working on class project
Clay Earth split in half to show the outer core, inner core, mantle and crust
Students celebrating star wars days
Two students moving science project across field outside

The integrated nature of STEAM instruction mirrors the multidisciplinary reality of life beyond school. STEAM also provides opportunities for creative expression and individual engagement with the content our students study through the arts (visual, musical, theatrical, and linguistic).

As an independent school for children with language-based learning differences (LLD), Howard School centers STEAM on the LLD needs of our students. STEAM affords Howard Students with multiple means to engage with content, to tackle learning challenges with their full constellation of personal strengths, and to express and share what they have learned. To that end, we do not view STEAM as an add-on, enrichment, or supplementary endeavor; the integrated STEAM initiative at The Howard School is intended to reach every student and to permeate every cell of the institutional body. Moreover, unlike many of our public and independent school counterparts, our STEAM program is not reserved only for high-achieving, STEM-career-bound students. To this end, the STEAM initiative at The Howard School is intended for all students, is focused on individual student growth, is experiential, is directly related to students’ LD needs, and is modeled in a self-similar manner throughout all of the existing hierarchical structures of the organization.