PAL STEM Fluency Labs in the East Midlands 2008-2010

This PAL Lab programme is being produced in the East Midlands region with Ignite Futures and its Ignition initiative. It is funded by the East Midlands Development Agency.

Ignition is running a three-year, six-strand programme designed to raise awareness, experience and aspiration in STEM in schools across the region. The PAL Lab programme is at the heart of Ignition’s support for teachers.

There have been three five-day residential Labs, followed by a non-residential reunion after several months. PAL’s Lab Director is Steve Mesure and, out of the first Lab, Ignition appointed a creative champion, teacher Heidi Gale, to work alongside him as co-director of the second Labs.  She also co-directed the third Lab alongside PAL’s Cathy Bereznicki

For PAL, the intensity and regional aspects of the three-year Lab programme is giving us a chance to see how powerful the methodology can be in and how it can impact on practice over a much longer period of time. By the end of the programme the PAL Lab methodology will be part of the region’s teacher development portfolio, to be improved and extended so that it is always fresh and flourishing.

This discrete programme in the East Midlands builds on PAL’s wider work in science and STEM.

“It was a personal journey. We changed as individuals. I don’t think we appreciated the degree to which we would step outside our own comfort zone and by doing that, learn things. It’s changed my whole approach. Normally you have a lesson and you think how do I do a quadratic equation creatively, and you approach it from the maths side, so it’s a bolt on. Whereas this was more an opportunity to have four days of being creative without worrying what it was going to give us, by doing it that way we discovered so much that we could use. It was like coming at it from the other side.” STEM Fluency Lab participant, maths teacher