Attribute 10.2
information sharing
Prepared: Information about middle school, secondary, and/or postsecondary STEM programs and/or STEM career topics is shared quarterly among counselors (elementary schools may not have counselors) and all teachers.
There are numerous ways STEM career topics and STEM programs are shared with the teachers and staff at Hendersonville Elementary through our counselor. Our guidance counselor meets quarterly with other counselors in our school district and attends conferences throughout the year. Topics include how counselors can be sure that our Career Exploration lessons, even as early as elementary school, are helping students begin to relate their interests and personal abilities to various careers. Additionally, our guidance counselor coordinates each year a Career Fair that aligns with our STEM Family Nights. A middle school orientation is organized by the middle school counselors for the transition from 5th grade to 6th grade. Students are invited to the middle school, given a tour of the school by current students and are able to participate in a question and answer session with current middle school students.They are informed about the expectations and STEM opportunities that will be available to them as they move on from elementary school. In her role as counselor, Mrs. Sloan attends local, regional and state conferences to stay informed about best practices for helping students achieve overall academic success and career readiness. Also, our STEM specialist shares information and resources about STEM through weekly meetings with teachers and through the website.
Through our STEM pipeline, the high school and middle school students partner with HES on many occasions to support our STEM units and programs. For example, the middle and high school students mentor our robotics program. To begin the program, Mr. Price at Hendersonville Middle School assisted in getting our program started and made sure that we had all the tools necessary to begin, and let his robotics program be viewed by our team. Once we were on our own, Mr. Murphy, an engineer at a local industry, provided the opportunity for the high school robotics team to assist our very own elementary team in accomplishing necessary missions with our robot. These high school students assisted our elementary students in coding, analyzing, and engineering our robot.
Also,our partners at Appalachian University invites our students to attend their annual STEM fair.
Below are pictures that were taken at our STEAM career fair. At the fair, we had engineers, scientists, musical artists, mathematicians, and careers which work closely with technology.
Below are two examples of lessons that encourage students to use the internet to learn more about different careers that the students may be interested in for the future.
Our guidance counselor had the opportunity to attend the NCSCA conference. Below are images of presentations from 2015 counselors conferences. Upon returning to school, this information was shared with teachers to better their instruction.
To the right is an email from Appalachian State University inviting our students to the STEM Expo. This provided our students with a lot of information pertaining to different fields of study in the STEM realm.
