Designing a STEM Pedagogy Course for Distance Learning: Triumphs, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we transitioned a STEM Pedagogy course for pre-service teacher candidates in an undergraduate elementary teacher education program to be taught fully online.  In this session, we will present the overall design of the course and the strategies we used to engage pre-service teachers with integrated STEM teaching and learning.  These included opportunities for pre-service teachers to work with home-based materials to engage in STEM tasks from a learner’s perspective while also exploring digital tools they can use as teachers.  We will share examples of asynchronous modules we designed to prepare pre-service teachers for zoom sessions with the goal of integrating data collection and the engineering design process as seamlessly as possible.  Next, we will discuss the challenges and lessons learned.  While pre-service teachers had ample opportunities to explore integrated STEM education as a learner, these opportunities did not always translate to success with planning their own STEM lessons.  As a result, we intend to build in opportunities for pre-service teachers to more explicitly develop their knowledge for planning integrated STEM lessons in future course iterations.  Last, we will open up the session for a discussion among other teacher education colleagues to consider successful, class-tested strategies to help teacher candidates learn STEM pedagogy from a distance.