Applying Research Thought Leader Wisdom—Part 3

​The Collaborative’s Research Thought Leaders help provide the strong research foundation for the Collaborative’s work. Each Thought Leader is nationally and internationally recognized in their own field and brings an extensive depth of experience and expertise. They also are adept at working across disciplines.

In previous newsletters, we brought you interviews with each of our Thought Leaders. This new series, launched in the Winter 2021 newsletter, reflects on how you might apply some of their most important ideas to your work in STEAM education. To do this, we’re using Collaborative research findings and examples of successful applications of these ideas in teaching practices. The first article in this series examined creative and innovative thinking. The second article explored STEAM and interdisciplinary learning. This third article in the series looks at collaboration. A future series article will address STEAM models. The information below is based on Thought Leaders’ interviews and an in-person convening in Washington, D.C. in 2016, that was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Collaboration
A hallmark of effective practices in STEAM education is collaboration, both among students and among teachers.

Thought Leader Input:

• Collective Cognition. Collaborative Research Thought Leader Sandi Chapman, PhD, points out that is important to create a social environment that promotes collaboration where students working in teams can generate collective cognition that can sometimes be more productive than individual efforts. Collaborative environments are equally effective in teachers’ groups.   
• Learn from Each Other. Research Thought Leader Rob Horowitz, PhD, adds that it’s important to engage in collaborative work across disciplines where everyone learns from everyone else. This includes ways of thinking and doing, and awareness of how these processes interact across disciplines. This can be done effectively in cross-disciplinary teacher collaboration, according to Dr. Horowitz. As a model for this, he points out the Collaborative’s effective cross-disciplinary collaborations among its members and participants from a variety of disciplines and learning settings.
• Application – Students. Recent Collaborative research, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, found that elementary and secondary students who participated in transdisciplinary** STEAM lessons could provide more complex examples of how they collaborated on a project. These collaborations were in the forms of co-planning, cooperating, communicating, sharing information, and giving feedback. These skills can be used in any phase of STEAM experiences, from reflecting on the problem they are given to solve, to hands-on investigations to gain information about the problem, to designing and creating a product that solves the problem, to explaining their final product to the class, to providing group critiques. The research also found that students in transdisciplinary STEAM experiences developed strong collaborative skills, in addition to perseverance and complex creative and critical thinking skills.
• Application – Teachers. The Collaborative’s STEAM teacher professional development also has discovered the importance of teachers’ effectively collaborating across disciplines. For example, a science teacher and a visual art teacher could collaborate on a lesson involving forces and motion. In addition to sharing lesson objectives, the science teacher would familiarize the art teacher with science concepts and vocabulary associated with forces and motion, such as (depending on the grade level, a push or pull, mechanical energy, or Newton’s Laws). The visual art teacher, in turn, would share her lesson objectives and familiarize the science teacher with art concepts and vocabulary applicable to forces and motion, such as line, shape, texture, form (associated with mass), and space. Then, the science and art teacher could use a Venn diagram to chart the overlaps where their disciplines can easily integrate and then develop STEAM lessons from there. Interestingly, the Collaborative’s most recent research also showed that this collaboration between teachers can extend to strong partnerships among their students.

** Transdisciplinary:

• Transdisciplinarity is the full integration of different disciplines that achieves a synthesis that transcends, through shared concepts and processes, the individual disciplines.  
• Transdisciplinary learning requires students to work on different disciplines interdependently and simultaneously, seeing that one discipline cannot complete the task without the other. This learning helps students understand that the disciplines rely on each other to contribute to a deeper understanding of each discipline and to achieve an overarching synthesis. This synthesis can help produce higher cognition that would be unlikely through addressing the disciplines individually. It can help solve problems, explain phenomena, create a product, and more. 
  
  An example of transdisciplinarity:​​​

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• ​Second grade students were given the problem of inventing a 3D wheel that could navigate Mars’ sandy and rocky surface. Through initial hands-on experiences integrating both disciplines, they combined their grade-level science concepts of texture, mass, rolling, and spinning with art concepts of line, shape, texture, and form. They also integrated disciplinary processes such as (science) observing, asking questions, experimenting, developing a solution, testing, evaluating, using data to develop a conclusion, and (art) creating, presenting, responding, and connecting. In teams, they then used these science and art concepts to design and make their invention and write a team presentation that would show how well their invention solved the problem. 
• In their experiences, the students didn’t separate the disciplines’ concepts and processes by thinking “I’m doing art now” or “I’m doing science now” or “I’m doing language arts now”. Their inventing process transcended each of the disciplines, driven by a strong synthesis that was richer than each individual discipline and that solved their problem, like in a real-world scenario.
• In this process, the students were highly engaged, learned the science and art concepts, developed higher-level thinking skills, and gained self-confidence in their abilities to solve problems.

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