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Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education helps students build critical thinking skills, supports innovation, and prepares students for living and working in today’s world.
Yet, despite its importance, incorporating valuable and authentic STEM lessons into the classroom is a challenge for many teachers. Today, we’re examining seven challenges in STEM teaching and providing tips and solutions to help you make lessons and implementation easier:
Here are seven common hurdles you may encounter when creating and implementing STEM lessons and practices in your classroom:
[1. Minimal teacher preparation](id-pd)
Do you feel prepared to teach effective STEM lessons? Many teachers don’t due to a lack of pedagogical or STEM content knowledge. Unfortunately, these teachers also often receive insufficient professional development (PD) to help them build strategies and confidence in these areas.
Whether you’re unsure about how the STEM subjects work together or you’re new to adapting student-centered or inquiry-based learning strategies, you may want to learn more, but aren’t sure where to start. You need PD that provides sustained support and stays current with the ever-evolving STEM fields to do your job well.
Talking to your admin and requesting STEM PD can help. Ask for sessions focused on interdisciplinary integration, new technologies, and adaptable pedagogical approaches. You can also explore STEM mentorship opportunities within your school or district. Pair up with an experienced and confident STEM teacher and learn from them.
Practicing new pedagogical approaches in your classroom can also help. Try an inquiry-based or project-based learning approach on a lesson you’re already confident teaching—in any subject, not just a traditional STEM subject.
This can help you test out these methods and learn what works and what doesn’t with material you’re already confident teaching. Your learnings can help you better understand and prepare to use these types of strategies when teaching STEM.
[2. Resource and materials limitations](id-resource)
Every school and district operates on a budget, but not all of them allocate a sufficient amount for STEM resources or materials. A well-rounded STEM program requires investment in up-to-date technology, engaging materials, specialized equipment, and comprehensive ongoing PD. The truth is, many schools and districts simply don’t have the funds to implement all of these initiatives.
This doesn’t mean your school or district can’t have a STEM program without all of these factors. It simply means you need to be more creative in how you spend your money, acquire materials, and use available resources.
Another related limitation is access disparity. When schools and districts don’t have the budget for STEM resources and PD, their students may not have access to the same quality of education as others who do.
Unequal access to technology outside the classroom can also be a barrier to students’ STEM education. For example, if students have to complete parts of a STEM project at home and return to class to continue working the next day, those without the necessary technology or tools to help them at home—such as internet access—are at a disadvantage.
The best way to overcome these barriers, both inside and outside the classroom, is to explore alternative funding options. Government grants, non-profit organizations, and community partnerships may offer funding to help your school or district get the resources or training needed to boost your STEM program.
Collaborating with other schools in your district or neighboring districts to share resources can also help. Creating lessons that rely on low-cost or DIY projects is another way to get creative about the resources and materials available.
To help students who lack access to technology and resources outside the classroom, try to provide before and after-school work blocks supervised by you or other teachers. This gives students additional chances to use your classroom resources without having to rely on what’s available at home. Partnering with community groups, such as your local library or community center, to provide access is also an option.
The most important thing to remember is that solving resource and material limitations is not solely your responsibility. Working with your administration, professional learning communities (PLCs), parents, and community leaders can help alleviate the load and support you in overcoming these obstacles.
[3. Curriculum integration](id-curriculum)
Even if you have all the training and resources you need to run your STEM program, implementing a relevant and integrated curriculum has its own challenges. Traditional education often treats each subject as its own entity. This makes it challenging to integrate lessons across disciplines, especially in middle and high school, where students switch classes and teachers for different subjects.
There may also be confusion about where and when to teach technology and engineering components. While some schools may offer computer or technology classes as specials, engineering typically isn’t offered at all in elementary or middle school. And it may only be available to certain high school students, depending on their desired career paths.
Beyond that, many curriculum structures are rigid. School year schedules are jam-packed and may leave little room for the in-depth, project-based learning that’s a hallmark of STEM education. When the goal has to be “fitting it all in” to make sure students get good scores on standardized tests, there’s not much room left for that hands-on experiential learning that happens in STEM.
Not all fixes for this challenge will be within your control. If you’re able to work with your school or district leaders to reprioritize learning across grades and subjects, that’s wonderful. But for many teachers, this isn’t an easily accessible option. Instead, you should try to balance what you can control with the requirements from your school or district curriculum.
Work with other teachers at your grade level—whether you work in contained classrooms or you teach individual subjects—to create STEM lessons that integrate different disciplines and work within your current curriculum. Collaboration can be the key that makes STEM implementation successful and takes the pressure off of feeling like you have to figure out solutions all on your own.
[4. Implementation struggles](id-implementation)
Even with a flexible curriculum, STEM implementation can still be a challenge. In general, there will always be competing priorities for classroom time. STEM lessons can be lengthy, especially when done right, because they encourage exploration and experimentation.
Especially outside of a self-contained classroom, you have only a limited amount of time with each group of students per day. Working in 40-minute blocks may interrupt the natural flow of your STEM lessons and projects. It’s also easy to spend too much time on the first phase of a STEM lesson, where students are working or exploring. You may run out of time for post-lesson activities, such as analysis, reflection, discussion, or presentation. Yet all of these phases are critical for a good STEM lesson.
STEM activities may also require more planning time than other lessons. With limited prep periods, this may feel frustrating or taxing when trying to complete everything within the allotted time. It may also be tricky to schedule a standard meeting time to collaborate with other teachers or interdisciplinary teams.
Finally, you may also struggle to measure the effectiveness of your STEM program. While project-based learning does have guidelines for monitoring student progress, it differs from traditional quizzes or tests, which typically have right or wrong answers. It can be challenging to determine how to define and measure outcomes such as problem-solving, creativity, innovation, and other key STEM skills.
If possible, try to work with your administration to reconfigure classroom time blocks. Could each period be an hour instead of 40 minutes? Could you implement STEM Fridays, where the entire afternoon is dedicated to collaborative STEM lessons for each grade?
If reworking the time blocks isn’t possible, careful lesson planning and project selection can help. Plan for smaller projects and experiments rather than lengthy ones. Plan the program over several days, dedicating a class period to each exploration phase, such as building, reflecting, analyzing, and presenting.
Collaboration across teachers and classrooms is also key. While you may only be able to accomplish so much in your classroom in 40 minutes, that doesn’t mean the entire lesson or project has to stop for your students. Perhaps when they attend their next class, the lesson will pick up where you left off.
Collaboration can also help ease the amount of planning time for individual teachers. Use the time already on your calendars to meet with your co-teachers or STEM mentors. PLC meetings, staff meetings, and other group brainstorming events make it easy to find time to meet and discuss your STEM plans.
To make STEM assessment easier, use rubrics. Work with your collaborative team to decide what success looks like in different STEM areas. Talk about behaviors and actions that indicate students are grasping critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and build your rubrics around these observations.
[5. Accessibility](id-access)
Ensuring equitable access to quality STEM education for all students is a significant challenge. By nature, STEM is great for diverse teaching. It allows students to demonstrate their knowledge in various ways and effectively removes some of the traditional barriers to education. Yet, noticeable accessibility gaps remain.
Students from underrepresented groups—and lower-funded schools and districts—may have fewer STEM resources available to them and limited exposure to STEM role models. Implicit biases may also affect how we perceive and support our students.
Adapting STEM lessons to cater to students with diverse learning styles, abilities, and backgrounds can also be a complex task. Aside from the digital divide in students’ homes, you want to ensure that students who require accommodations and assistive technologies in the classroom have the access they need.
When teaching about STEM, especially when providing background on STEM leaders, ensure that you promote role models from across gender and racial or ethnic groups. Creating a welcoming classroom environment with a mindset that fosters iteration and experimentation, where everyone's ideas and suggestions are valued, helps students feel a sense of belonging in the STEM classroom.
Work to provide differentiated instruction, flexible groupings, and assistive technology to meet the diverse needs of your students. E-learning solutions, such as virtual labs and simulations, can also help you provide access to more sophisticated equipment and resources at a lower cost.
[6. STEM field evolution](id-evolution)
STEM is ever-changing. Technological advancements occur daily, and it’s challenging for curriculum and resources to keep pace with innovations such as AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies. With advancements also come new considerations, such as the ethics of innovation.
AI is a great example. There are many ethical concerns over its classroom use. Will it help students cheat? Will it hurt their ability to build skills? Will it show them unvetted content? How can we use this technology responsibly?
The best way to keep your students informed about advancements in STEM is to stay up-to-date on current events in the field. Newsela’s subject products offer science-related current events content that covers many of these topics, such as social media and AI.
Making STEM evolution a topic of conversation in your PLCs or staff meetings can also help all teachers stay aware of advancements in these fields and have open and honest discussions of their ethical use in the classroom.
[7. Mental health considerations](id-mentalhealth)
Beyond physical challenges, emotional and psychological factors can impact STEM education in the classroom for teachers and students. Keeping students motivated to learn STEM and engaged in their lessons is one hurdle. Another is that some STEM concepts, such as those in math and science, may seem too abstract for students to grasp, especially without proper background knowledge and scaffolding.
Students may also feel pressure to succeed in STEM, but are accustomed to traditional grading methods, where it’s much easier and simpler to self-monitor their progress or success. This may make them hesitant to try STEM, as there’s less of a clear linear path to “success” than there is with taking a test.
Additionally, some students experience math and science anxiety. When they feel the concepts are too abstract or if they struggle in these subjects, they may develop anxiety about projects or assessments associated with them. This can lead to demotivation and a decline in self-esteem.
Finally, teacher burnout in STEM is real. There are high expectations, extensive planning, and ever-changing and evolving information. If you take on too much, especially when you’re still learning how to incorporate it all, it can take a toll on your mental health.
To help your students stay motivated and engaged in STEM, follow recommendations you’d use in any other subject. Allow for student choice, make your lessons relevant, provide timely feedback, and set clear expectations.
Creating a classroom culture of iteration can also help students become more comfortable with the less-structured, project-based, or inquiry strategies in a STEM classroom. They’ll learn that getting something “wrong” isn’t the same as failing. It’s just an opportunity to learn what didn’t work and try again.
To help prevent teacher burnout, lean on collaboration. You don’t have to take on all the STEM planning by yourself. Partner with school and district leaders, other teachers, parents, community organizations, and non-profit groups to find resources, make lesson plans, and implement STEM in the classroom. Not only can this lighten your load, but it can also support stronger STEM teaching across your school and district.
Make real-world science relevant with Newsela STEM
Newsela STEM with Generation Genius elevates K-12 science education, seamlessly weaving in technology and engineering concepts, with math as a complement. It’s your tool to fuse STEM and literacy, thanks to great features like:
Engaging science content: Boost students’ interest in and knowledge of science concepts with real-world phenomena, timely news, and Generation Genius videos.
Aligned Curriculum Complements: Enhance and support the curriculum materials you already use with content aligned to top science resources.
AI-powered tools: Use Luna, your AI teaching assistant, to generate lesson plans, translate text into 40+ languages, define Tier III vocabulary words, generate graphic organizers, and more!
Deeper learning supports: Tuva interactive datasets, Generation Genius 5E lessons, Claim-Evidence-Reasoning prompts and activities, and science courses for every grade band allow students to dive into deeper learning driven by critical thinking.
Embedded scaffolding: Make complex science texts and concepts accessible with embedded scaffolding tools like adaptive leveling and read-aloud mode.
Skill-building resources: Support the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) with ready-to-go activities, performance tasks, and teacher supports.
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