In some ways, these times call for what has been the ethos of Brooklyn Technical High School since its inception: an engineering mindset. The engineering mindset is not merely about designing and mastering the latest cutting-edge technologies. It’s about having the attitudes, knowledge and skills to move beyond being consumers of the world to being creators and shapers of solutions that improve the lives of our communities, deepen humanity and preserve the natural world.

In some ways, these times call for what has been the ethos of Brooklyn Technical High School since its inception: an engineering mindset. The engineering mindset is not merely about designing and mastering the latest cutting- edge technologies. It’s about having the attitudes, knowledge and skills to move beyond being consumers of the world to being creators and shapers of solutions that improve the lives of our communities, deepen humanity and preserve the natural world.

What does this mean for the future of STEM education, especially at a premier technical high school like Brooklyn Tech?

In my 30 years of researching and developing STEM education experiences, I’ve observed this about the most impactful programs in times of great technological change: they often focus on cultivating students’ habits of mind in the context of solving problems that are personally meaningful, interdisciplinary and project-based.

The American Association of Engineering Education has a roadmap to get us there. It has identified the habits of mind that prepare young people for jobs of the future and foster active citizenship. They apply broadly to what a 21st century well-rounded education for the future could be:

Optimism: supporting students to always think about how things can be improved;
Collaboration: learning how to work in teams and actively seek out diverse perspectives;
Persistence: embracing and learning from failure and trying again;
Creativity: seeing patterns and new relationships in the world and imagining new ways of doing things;
Conscientiousness: expressing empathy for others and weighing ethical considerations in all that one does; and
Systems thinking: recognizing and considering how systems are connected in complex ways and how changes to parts of a system can have ripple effects.

These habits of mind are as relevant to tomorrow’s historians and artists as they are to future epidemiologists, robotics engineers, and all of those yet-to-be conceived careers.

From the industrial age to the digital age, Brooklyn Tech has cultivated these habits of mind through hands-on, minds-on majors and course offerings. From designing industrial products to investigating how law shapes society, Tech has helped students exercise their creative vision, investigate and debate complex issues, consider the ethics of their actions, and design solutions to problems worth solving.

Tech can continue this tradition through an ongoing commitment to building students’ resilience in the face of change to become the innovators of the future.

Learn more about the American Association of Engineering Education’s Framework for P12 learning.

Dorothy Bennett, Director of Creative Pedagogy at the New York Hall of Science, has worked in educational media and science education for 35 years.