Foster STEM dispositions

In your classroom: Identify dispositions and their supporting behaviours

Consider how you explicitly or implicitly value the STEM dispositions in your classroom. What evidence would students use to interpret your beliefs and values?

Use this poster as a talking point in your classroom or to guide students’ self-reflections on their STEM dispositions and skills.

Use the STEM dispositions snapshot to explore how students rate their own readiness to enact each disposition and provide opportunities for students to journal about their experiences.

Use the STEM dispositions poster as a visual tool in your classroom to highlight examples of students demonstrating high levels of skill or invite students to push themselves to increase their level on the meter.

Work with your students to create group STEM disposition posters. Encourage students to create their own images and text. Use these posters to highlight examples of students demonstrating high levels of skill or invite students to push themselves to increase their level on the meter.

Classroom talk tips

• Model curiosity by wondering out loud about phenomena or ideas.
• Broaden students’ ideas about what counts in STEM, by valuing and rewarding not just right answers, but student contributions that demonstrate curiosity, scepticism, creativity and intellectual risk-taking.
• Link students’ dispositions to thinking like a relevant STEM practitioner, for example, ‘What a great thing to wonder about, Sam! I love your curiosity; you’re really thinking like an engineer.’
• Actively embrace and celebrate confusion and disagreements as crucial moments in learning, for example, ‘I see that we have a range of ideas about what’s happening here. Excellent! Let’s work through these different perspectives to build our understanding.’
• Talk about failure and setbacks when they occur, honouring the emotions associated with struggle, and the value of persistence in the face of obstacles.
• Notice and acknowledge perseverance and effort in reasoning and sense-making rather than just the outcome, for example, ‘Lisa, I can see all the different ways you’ve tried to solve this and the way you’ve connected these ideas. That shows fantastic thinking and persistence.’
• Explicitly teach students how to respectfully disagree, for example, by modelling sentence stems, such as ‘I respectfully disagree with … because I think …’ or ‘I like your ideas, but…’
• Model and explicitly teach students how to ask questions to understand another person’s perspective, for example, ‘Can you tell me more about …?’ , ‘What do you mean by …?’ or ‘Could you please explain …?