In recent years, STEM has become a rallying cry in education. While sincere efforts have been made to integrate STEM standards into curricula, preparing teachers to integrate STEM lags behind. It is imperative to focus on teacher education for STEM, especially for elementary teachers. This presentation is based on insights gathered from an ongoing action research project designed to understand and address challenges pre-service and in-service elementary STEM teachers face as they apply the ideas from their university courses to their teaching practice. One prominent finding from this research is that the role of dispositions in teacher education is undervalued and undertheorized. My presentation revolves around the importance of developing dispositions from two perspectives: dispositions as objectives for elementary students and the dispositions teachers bring to their classrooms.

Dispositions are ways people think, act, and engage. They shape how individuals learn and develop, and they are closely related to habits of mind and mindsets. Dispositions can be more affective (such as having a willingness to struggle) or cognitive (such as looking for and making use of patterns). Although dispositions have recently become more explicitly incorporated into curricula in the United States, they often play a subordinate role to more easily assessable and testable content specific standards. Unfortunately, in the United States, as in many countries, testing often drives what gets taught and how it gets taught. I would argue that fundamental elements of STEM such as the design process for engineering and scientific inquiry are dispositional in nature. While there are plenty of facts, procedures, concepts, etc. in any design or inquiry, the primary objective is dispositional. It’s about having students behave like engineers when they are creating prototypes and iterating through the testing and revising process. It’s about having students behave like scientists when they are generating testable questions and designing procedures to test their ideas. Have teachers had opportunities to work with students during the design process or with students who are inquiring into the natural world? Those opportunities have the potential to highlight the power of dispositions in their students but also the challenges inherent when dispositions become the focal objective.

Although much of teacher education revolves around developing teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, my research indicates that the development of teachers’ dispositions is often underappreciated and neglected. Elementary school teachers are expected to teach a wide swath of subjects, and understandably, they will feel more comfortable with certain content than with others. Working with students who are engaged in STEM explorations, such as the design process or scientific inquiry, requires teachers to be open to students’ ideas. Even for teachers with strong content knowledge, there is an ever-present chance that the students’ ideas will veer from what the teacher knows or with which the teacher feels comfortable. How can teachers support their students when they venture into uncharted territory? Can teachers do what they are expecting their students to do—engage with new ideas and take risks with the unknown? My work with teachers suggests that without strong dispositions the full potential of those explorations becomes unrealized.

Keywords: Teacher education, dispositions, STEM, mathematics, science, engineering, technology.