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Without adopting inquiry-based, student-centered, skill-driven approaches to teaching and learning -- all nested in a system that values innovation -- STEM education will become just another term for additional math and engineering courses.

heart of any STEM program should be courses in which students create products, not just take tests

Allow for creativity

Despite the buzz about the flipped classroom and its promotoin as the “real revolution” in learning, there has been plenty of pushback and lots of questioning this year about what exactly this practice entails. What expectations and assumptions are we making about students’ technology access at home when we assign them online videos to watch? Why are video-taped lectures so “revolutionary” if lectures themselves are so not? (As Karim Ani, founder of Mathalicious pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed this summer, “Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it’s a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it’s a ‘revolution.’”)

And as the year rolls to a close, some teachers who’ve experimented with flipping their classrooms are evaluating the practices and questioning the hype about its transformative potential. Shelley Wright, for example, had written a blog post last year about why she loved “the flip.” But by October of 2012, she’d penned another: “The Flip: The End of a Love Affair.” She noted that she didn’t really disagree with anything she’d said last year, but that flipping the classroom “simply didn’t produce the tranformative learning experience I knew I wanted for my students.”

And that question is likely to lead to an incredibly powerful “flip” — one that isn’t about video-based lectures assigned after school, but about flipping the classroom away from the focus on teachers’ control of content and towards student inquiry and agency. (Here's hoping that's a trend I get to talk about in 2013.)

redesigning the curriculum to take advantage of the affordances of the 1-to-1 mobile devices that were being used. The technology was not bolted onto an existing curriculum

Most importantly, they developed into a community of practice — a professional group of educators who work with each other, who support each other

Adding technology to direct-instruction, paper-and-pencil-based pedagogy, will have little impact