Education Guide 10.18.26 - Flipbook - Page 11
| Sunday, October 18, 2026
gle interdisciplinary project might touch
math, art and writing in the same week;
and structured extensions for older students – research partnerships, mentor
programs or fellowship-style tracks –
that run alongside the regular course
schedule rather than replacing it.
The outcomes schools point to are
fairly consistent across the research
on project-based and interdisciplinary STEM education: improved problem-solving under ambiguity, more
comfort with failure and revision, and
stronger collaboration skills, since most
of these projects are built around teams
rather than individual work.
That long timeline is part of why so
many of these programs, particularly at girls’ schools, frame themselves
explicitly around closing a persistent
gender gap. Women make up roughly 26 percent of the U.S. computing
workforce, according to 2024 data
from the National Center for Women &
Information Technology – a number that
has moved only slowly over the past two
decades despite a large and growing
tech sector. The logic behind starting
STEAM exposure early, and making it
a normal part of the school day rather
than an opt-in elective, is that a field
feels open to you in adulthood largely
based on whether it felt open to you as
a kid.
With this in mind, Garrison Forest,
a K-12, all-girls independent school in
Owings Mills, runs its STEAM program
from a Lower School “Imagineering” lab
straight through to a research partnership with Johns Hopkins – built into the
regular school day rather than set aside
as an elective. A preschool classroom
and a research lab at Johns Hopkins
don’t have much in common on paper.
At Garrison Forest School, closing that
distance – one prototype, one lab placement at a time – has been the point of
the STEAM program for the better part
of two decades.
Founded in 1910, Garrison Forest is
one of the older independent schools in
the Baltimore area, and it has built its
STEAM identity around two connected
pieces: a Lower School program called
Imagineering, and an Upper School
research partnership called WISE.
Imagineering starts before most
students would see a formal science
class anywhere else. A full-time specialist works with students from preschool through fifth grade, folding prob-
lem-solving and prototyping into daily
Lower School work rather than running it
as a pull-out enrichment period. Its signature event is an annual STEAM Week,
when fourth and fifth grade classes
pause for several days so that students
can take on one hands-on project from
start to finish. Past projects have included building animal habitats for campus,
engineering interactive stuffed toys, and
programming plants to respond to touch
using basic circuitry.
This structure is the school’s answer
to a question every STEAM program
eventually has to face: whether it’s a real
part of the curriculum or an add-on. At
Garrison Forest, Imagineering isn’t optin – every student in the relevant grades
takes part, and the projects are built by
classroom teachers working alongside
the school’s specialists rather than a
separate staff running a separate track.
In the Upper School, that same instinct
shows up in the James Center, which
the school describes as the connective
tissue between its STEM programming,
financial literacy, leadership development and service work, rather than a
standalone offering.
The most distinctive piece is WISE
– Women in Science and Engineering
– a partnership with Johns Hopkins
University the school launched in 2005.
Through it, upper schoolers spend
a semester embedded in a Hopkins
research lab, with past placements at
the Whiting School of Engineering, the
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences,
the Bloomberg School of Public Health
and Johns Hopkins Hospital, along with
the Peabody Library and the university’s
archaeological museum. By the school’s
own accounting, more than 200 students have logged upwards of 17,000
research hours through the program,
presenting their findings to Hopkins
faculty and graduate students at the end
of each term, according to the school’s
public materials and from previous coverage of the program.
Like many schools, Garrison Forest’s
approach isn’t about a single elective
bolted onto senior year – it’s exposure
that starts young enough to feel ordinary. A student who has been prototyping since preschool doesn’t have
to decide, at 16, whether engineering
is something people like her do. She’s
already been doing it since before she
could read.
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