New Perspectives in Science Education

Producing a sustainable product quality and innovation ecosystem is not an easy task especially in schools. A good teacher will try to make the student understand a concept or skill easily, and a bad teacher will only make the student struggle harder to comprehend the concept or skill. This will resulted with the product to be dull and boring, the students unable to develop a quality product and even worse, they have no idea and fundamentals to develop a good STEM product. The STEM Mentoring Program used a one group experimental research design to develop teachers various practical skills and innovative pedagogic strategies leading to meaningful and productive STEM project development resulting with quality product. Involvenment of experts and post graduates from Higher Leaning Institution (HLI) as mentors to teachers is one of the key element for this mentoring program. Besides mentors, there are other elements used such as online mentoring, face to face mentoring, project report, video presentation and competition to ensure and enhance the quality of the STEM project. The mentoring program involved 80 teachers in rural setting, 5 mentor and 25 postgraduates from various engineering background. After the first training and intervention to teachers, the teachers then coaches 3 students and 1 new teacher to developed the STEM projects at their school. Based on this strategies, remarkable change in the idea, process, quality of STEM projects as well as skills was developed. 

Keywords: STEM mentoring, STEM project development, HLI experts and postgraduate involvement.

References:
[1] Palmer, P. J. (2017). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. John Wiley & Sons.