Story 7: STEAM

By Matt Villano

As more and more technology jobs emerge in and around the Bay Area, STEAM education is steaming along. For students, this means more science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) classes. For parents, it translates into better-than-ever course selections and increased opportunities for kids to find subjects that are appealing. Put differently, STEAM is perhaps the most important focus in all schools today. “STEAM is crucial in all areas of education,” said José Carlos Arriaga, a fourth grade Spanish bilingual teacher at Lockwood STEAM Academy in Oakland. “STEAM incorporates real-world applications that helps bridge student’s learning into becoming lifelong problem solvers, and it helps create higher engagement in the classroom as students love engaging in project-based learning.” Arriaga went on to say STEAM “allows students to discover and brainstorm solutions to everyday problems, they collaborate with their peers and engage in thorough academic discussions that mimic a real-life work setting.” Arriaga is a great ambassador of STEAM; Lockwood is considered a top STEAM school in the region. The school strives to make STEAM a cross-curricular focus for teachers across grade levels and aims to integrate and reinforce STEAM problem-solving skills everywhere students are learning. Lockwood also implemented the FIRST Lego Robotics League to introduce students to the fundamentals of engineering as they design, code and create unique solutions to real-world problems. Arriaga noted that the school shaped the program with a design-thinking framework that students can take on in their future studies.

bay area school embraces steam to create 'lifelong problem solvers'

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The Harker School in San Jose has a yearly science symposium for students.

Credit: Mark Kocina

“At the center of our league are the core values that transcend to their daily lives such as cooperation, discovery, inclusion and community sharing,” he said. “Students are learning how to engage in academic discussion and collaboration as they try to work together to solve a common problem." Another standout school for STEAM: BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, where students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades must complete 7.5 hours of biology, chemistry and physics each week. Graduates of the school must pass all three sciences at the honors level and must complete and pass the exam for at least one Advanced Placement math and science course. According to the BASIS website, the curriculum “prepares students to be participants, not spectators, in the dynamic, exciting, and unpredictable world of the 21st century.” This means all students take high-level mathematics courses earlier than usual, and that the entire math curriculum is rooted in the Saxon Math program, starting off one grade level ahead of the sequence. From pre-algebra on, the BASIS curriculum adopts the Martin-Gay Developmental Math Series. A well-rounded education is on the agenda at The Nueva School on the Peninsula. Here, though STEAM is a big part of the curriculum, school administrators and educators alike believe STEAM should be part of a broader and deeper approach to learning. “Nueva doesn’t identify as STEAM school; we have a strong STEAM program but equally strong humanities and arts programs,” said Angi Chau, director of the school’s innovation lab, where most of the cutting-edge STEAM projects and curriculum are put into place. “We believe the future is all disciplines, not just one.”

Students perform in the spring play, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” at the Harker School in San Jose.

Credit: Jane Snyder

As Chau explains it, the name of the game at Nueva is project-based, data-driven learning. It just so happens that often this learning revolves in some way around STEAM. An intern program this summer, for instance, focused on a mystery bacteria lab in which students tested bacteria and examined it under a microscope to try to determine what it was. The group worked to revise the existing methods for identifying the bacteria to make them easier for students to follow, and they developed new tests to better distinguish between similar strains of bacteria. Other Nueva programs throughout the year follow a similar tack. At The Harker School in San Jose, STEAM is baked into everything, starting in transitional kindergarten and going all the way up through 12th grade. The school has a lower, middle and upper school. Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs, said that one of the school’s standout STEAM programs is a science symposium that empowers upper-school students to showcase all the research and data collection they have done over the years. “There’s a win-or-lose aspect but really the symposium goes beyond competition,” Gargano said. “It’s a day of showcasing all the research our students have done, of taking their high intellect in all these different areas. When you know these things in deep ways, you can almost naturally put them together with the aid of a mentor.”

King and her husband, Greg, “felt that we would be errant as parents if we did not provide Alexa with a bilingual education,” she recalls. “Mandarin was important to us because of my heritage, and at that time, China was becoming a force on the world stage, and we wanted her to have every advantage to participate in the global economy of the future. Also, there are significant studies that show the benefit to brain development of learning a second language and students in immersion programs generally score higher on standardized testing than their monolingual peers.” At CAIS, elementary school students receive 50 percent of their instruction in English and 50 percent in Mandarin, a ratio that switches to 65-35 in middle school, said King, who also worked at CAIS for four years before launching the Mandarin Institute in 2011. The majority of CAIS students come from non-native speaking backgrounds, which is also true of most Chinese-language immersion programs around the country, King adds. King said she particularly appreciated “multiple opportunities” for CAIS students to spend time in Taiwan and Beijing, including a program in which fifth graders spend two weeks with a host family in Taiwan, and in return host a student from the Taiwanese family in their Bay Area home. “You cannot become proficient in a language without becoming proficient in a culture,” King notes. “Doing exchange programs and travel abroad enhances the cultural experience.” At Shu Ren International School, which has a total of 185 students in a preschool through grade 5 campus in Berkeley and a preschool and elementary school campus in San Jose, Mandarin language is immersed within their International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme.

“Families choose Shu Ren because of its commitment to an inquiry-based program, its language immersion and its caring community,” the school’s co-head of school Deron Marvin said. “Despite having a few near-native Chinese speakers, our program is still geared for all learners to reach fluency in the language.” Shu Ren students learn Mandarin through the whole curricular program with many of the specialist classes being taught in Mandarin, including performing arts and physical education. “The immersive experience renders multilingual and culturally literate students,” according to the school. With so many language and learning approaches, “finding the right match between a student and an independent school can be very individualized,” said

“About 24 percent of our families are francophone, schoolwide, and many of our families are multilingual in other languages. But we also have non-francophone families who love the way our school develops cross-cultural learners in a vibrant, international community,” Bihn said. La Scuola International School, a pre-kindergarten through grade 8 Italian immersion school in San Francisco, with a campus in East Palo Alto for ages 2 to 7, offers the IB primary years and middle school programs with a unique Italian twist. Students learn through “inquiry in a beautiful environment inspired by the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy,” said Head of School Valentina Imbeni. “Every day, the students at La Scuola ask challenging questions and we take those questions seriously. They lead — and embrace — their own ability to learn across languages, across cultures and across subjects. Because when children are open to the world and protagonists in their own education, there’s no limit to their ability to learn, find beauty in life and discover extraordinary answers,” Imbeni explains. Only 30 percent of La Scuola’s multicultural student body hears Italian spoken at home, but “our school Italian culture revolves around human connections, affecting everything we do, from how we eat meals to how we resolve conflicts to how we greet each other with affection,” Imbeni notes. “We tell our families during open houses that if they don’t like hugs, La Scuola may not be the best fit for them.” While pursuing an IB diploma can grant students access to universities worldwide, and prepare them well for U.S. college studies, language immersion offers benefits both in and outside the classroom, according to educators.

Given its historic diversity of cultures and growing international workforce, the Bay Area boasts a wide array of private schools with language-immersion programs and coursework designed to meet global standards. But choosing which one is right for a particular child involves more than deciding which language — or languages — besides English are taught. “Really, all independent schools are niche schools,” explains Deborah Dowling, executive director of the California Association of Independent Schools. “Each one has its own culture, its own program emphasis, unique facilities, opportunities and approaches.” Bay Area immersion schools may vary not only in their language of instruction — Cantonese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish, as well as English — but also in their social and academic environment. Some offer a curriculum designated as International Baccalaureate (IB), which includes elementary and middle school programs and an academically challenging, two-year high school diploma program that includes the study of other languages. The French American + International School in San Francisco, for example, offers bilingual learning in the French national education system from pre-kindergarten to grade 8 and then a choice of tracks for grades 9 to 12: English international baccalaureate or French baccalaureate. “Our mission puts academic rigor, diversity, critical thinking and cross-cultural communication right at the heart of the learning experience,” said Head of School Melinda Bihn. “Our students are pursuing world-class academic programs, in more than one language, in an international school community with students and teachers from across the globe. They are learning skills that will allow them to thrive anywhere.” As San Francisco’s oldest bilingual school, founded in 1962, “our French roots run deep,” notes Bihn. Still, Gallic ties aren’t required to enroll, and incoming high schoolers who don’t speak French may enroll in the English IB program.

All told, Harker’s upper school offers 115 different electives — more than half of which are STEAM. Interestingly, computer science is not one of these electives, meaning every student must take the class as a prerequisite. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, other STEAM programs are designed to supplement existing school programs and provide additional tutoring to help students wrap their heads around these different subjects. SF STEM Academy, for instance, is a program offered through the Japanese Community Youth Council to help teenagers from all over San Francisco gain familiarity and comfortability with high-level STEAM concepts and curriculum. The program hosts weekly workshops, field trips and academic and wellness support, as well as college application assistance.

The Harker School hosts an artist-in-residence reception.

Credit: Jane Snyder

What’s more, SF STEAM offers summer internships at $16.50 per hour and $250 cash rewards for students who attend a certain number of workshops. Arriaga, the teacher at Lockwood, said it’s important for parents to ask lots of questions about STEAM curriculum as they’re considering new schools and to be prepared to push back if the answers are nebulous or not specific. As Arriaga sees it, STEAM has been a buzz word for many years, but didn’t really “come of age” until the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a need for technological literacy for both students and teachers. Looking forward, he said his school’s goal is to encourage all teachers to incorporate STEAM units or cross curricular topics in their classroom to bridge the learning happening in their STEAM enrichment class.

“In order to make this happen, we are hoping to have a STEAM exposition where students across grade levels prepare a presentation/project in their classrooms to present to the entire school and community,” he said. “We are hoping that this will encourage all students to have an interest in STEAM and demonstrate an understanding of the real-world application of STEAM topics and problem-solving skills.”

The Harker School hosts an artist-in-residence reception.

Credit: Jane Snyder

A student at the Harker School participates in a science symposium.

Credit: Jane Snyder

A student at the Harker School participates in a science symposium.

Credit: Jane Snyder

The Harker School hosts an artist-in-residence reception.

Credit: Jane Snyder