Awakening Your Stem School; Assuring a Job-Ready Workforce

by Aaron L. Smith (Contributor)

Dr. Aaron Smith's thoughtful narrative offers ideas, tools and actions that both community leaders and educators can deploy to inspire students and assure that a job-ready workforce flows from the local schools. Here resides a guide for community and business leaders on how to become involved at a meaningful level to make sure employers can recruit capable and prepared students. Here school leaders can become inspired to embed the skill sets needed in the 21st century workplace.

222 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2015

About the author

There is a lot you may not know about Aaron. Today, Aaron Smith enjoys active leadership of one of Virginia’s most visible and awarded STEM schools.

He leads Newport News, Virginia’s Denbigh High School Aviation Academy, with classrooms and laboratories at the Newport News Williamsburg International Airport, a school with affiliations to major business and industry throughout the region.

The magnet STEM school has received national recognition from hosting a live downlink with the astronauts on board the International Space Station to becoming a PRIME (Partnership Response In Manufacturing Education) School by the Society of Manufactured Engineers Education Foundation. Students can learn to fly, learn aircraft maintenance, airport management, air traffic control, and other aviation electives. Students are building an airplane in the terminal.

Aaron’s books reveal his passion for STEM education and workforce development.

His first book, Awakening Your STEM School enables educators and business leaders to take their current school and modernize it into an elite STEM site.

Blank Check: What If You Were Asked To Reinvent Public Education is his Young Adult novel about a quest to build the perfect public school.

A 2008 graduate of Old Dominion University with a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, Dr. Aaron L. Smith has over two decades of experience in the classroom as a mathematics teacher and administrator. His dissertation focused on comparing alternative teaching certification routes to that of traditional teaching certification in conjunction to SOL results.

Aaron has developed a passion for workplace readiness and STEM where he has shared his knowledge as an adjunct professor at Old Dominion University and Christopher Newport University.

He received the WHRO Public Television’s Technology Administrator Award and the Crystal Star Award from the National Dropout Prevention Center.

Reviews

[Karen S.]

Our school systems are constantly being reminded to prepare our students for the workforce especially in jobs related to science, technology, engineering and math. But how can one go about transforming his or her school to be a STEM school? Dr. Aaron Smith does a fantastic job of laying the foundation to implement such a program. He relays personal experiences, both good and bad, to help teachers and administrators begin or modify their own program initiatives. He stresses heavily that creating a STEM learning environment is a school team effort. Getting teachers, administrators, students and parents on board is not as hard as it may appear especially with Dr. Smith's ideas to garner local business and science community support through viable and sustaining partnerships. Each chapter concludes with ideas in action to keep progress on track. He also includes appendices of valuable resources for lesson planning, technology applications and grant funding resources. Reading this book will definitely inspire and encourage!

[Amber Gregg -Judging More Than Just the Cover]

Awakening Your STEM School is a book of ideas, examples, and tools for successfully running a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math education) school. Its main focus is preparing students to work in those fields.

I want to tell you all a little background about myself before I review this book. I actually live very close to the STEM school featured in this book in Coastal Virginia. I just recently moved here, but it is already very easy to why a STEM school would perform exceptionally well here. We have Navy bases with tons of Navy ships, plus large jets flying overhead, nearby airports, many science-related museums, crazy underwater tunnels, and an engineer's paradise. We actually moved here because my husband got a job working at an engineering firm.

My background is in early childhood education, so I am not an expect in high school STEM, but I do know the importance of actual experiences as a learning process (versus reading textbooks and listening to lectures). So any time a school can provide hands-on experiences, it is sure to be a memorable learning event. I won’t get into the politics regarding magnet schools, but I can see how a school like this would be great for students who maybe didn’t feel like a great student in elementary school. Literacy is the main focus in the early years of education, so students who have more logical and mathematical minds, tend to feel like poorer students. So it is wonderful that a STEM school can give all the practical and logical students skills that are applicable in many high demand careers.

Now back to the book itself. There are some personal narratives in this story, which tie everything together, but aren't the strong part of this book. The writing isn’t as remarkable as most books, however, to meet my point from above, this is someone with a math and science mindset, not a reading and writing mindset. So I can’t really discredit the book for that.

To read the rest of my review, go here: http://judgingmorethanjustthecover.bl...