The Boston Arts Academy is a unique urban high school in that its curriculum is devoted to the intersection of arts and academics. Our school believes that art is essential to our students' learning, and it is necessary for us to integrate arts into our STEM courses. Our school curriculum is packed, so it is difficult for us to add new courses. Therefore, we needed to change our pedagogical approaches to find ways to connect theory to practice, which has resulted in our creation of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) as a guiding philosophy. We need to show our students the use of STEAM concepts in real-life applications. In searching for a solution to change the way we teach high school students STEM courses, we found a new and unique program called CAPSULE offered by Northeastern University. The approach uses engineering-based learning (EBL). Thus, two teachers (one teaches chemistry and one teaches physics/math) from our school attended the Professional Development (PD), offered as part of an NSF grant. Unlike traditional pedagogical approaches such as the 4E and 5E models and the scientific method, the EBL pedagogical approach provides two benefits. First, it contextualizes the STEM concepts and makes the underlying mathematical or scientific principles more relevant to the student, and in doing so it generates challenges and excitement. It is our hypothesis that by adding EBL as an organizing principle to our STEM classes, this will lead to increased student achievement and interest in STEM education as measured by the number of students taking elective science and math classes and the number of students selecting STEM careers. Second, the EBL provides a general framework, skill set and tools that are applicable to any STEM subject or course. That is possible because EBL pedagogy uses the engineering design process (EDP) and the college-level known capstone experience. The paper will cover the details of our implementations of EBL in our courses, the changes we have made, the obstacles we faced in integrating EBL into our chemistry and physics/math courses, the results, students' reactions and feedback, and what we have learned. We also present how we implemented our action plans we developed during the PD in our classrooms. One important lesson we have learned is to build capacity in the same high school, i.e. the more teachers who train and use the EBL methodology, the better and more effective the implementation and the support system are as teachers can bounce ideas off of each other.
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