NSF Awards: 1513009
Based at the Science Museum of Minnesota, we will follow the yearlong journey of an all-female, multigenerational professional learning community as they build comfort and confidence with in-depth and expanded use of technology. Gathering both pre-service teachers and high school youth from traditionally underrepresented communities, this project creates a space where youth and adults work together on an innovative research project aimed at impacting the field of teaching technology. We will highlight and show the connections across our program model, project staff, and community partners.
Their pathway includes content training, professional development, and explicit opportunities to try out new teaching practices. Merging informal and formal educational practices, they have taught technology content in both summer camp and school based settings. These varied settings provide an opportunity for them to reflect on the best ways to share learning experiences with technology for both youth participants and their teachers.
Research is central to the project and to the video. Very few museums are working so deeply with emerging teaching professionals in partnership with universities. Combining informal and formal teaching experiences enables us to ask questions about what teachers from those respective settings can learn from each other and what emerging classroom educators can learn from teaching in informal learning spaces. An additional opportunity provided by this project is the inclusion of high school youth. Using a near-peer mentoring framework will help us understand ways that teen girls use role models as inspiration to pursue careers in technology fields or in teaching professions.
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Shona Ramchandani
Michael Haney
Very nice presentation about community and very good examples of ways this makes inroads into classrooms. The project uses multi-generational teams but I am confused about the intended impact beyond inservice and preservice teachers. Their participation in the community is valuable to the community and undoubtedly to them, but what is the hoped for impact on others and how will these impacts be seen?
The presentation is about the community served and the dynamics of that community but I am quite unclear about the content. Computational thinking was specifically mentioned, but are there certain computational methods and tools that the project emphasizes?
Kaleen Tison Povis
Senior Evaluation & Research Associate
Thank you for starting the discussion, Michael.
IMPACTS
You're right the video focuses more on the LinCT community of young adults and teachers and we didn't present much on the boarder impacts yet. Ideally, we'll be back next year to share more :)
In addition to the growth on the part of the participants in the program, we are looking for how participating (preservice) teachers go on to integrate making technology and computational thinking in their classrooms, thereby impacting all of their students. Excitingly, we have also started to hear of organizational level changes. For example, both of the universities from which we draw our preservice teachers are eager for these experiences and are building off of LinCT to provide more training for their teachers (grant proposals, new classes, and ideas are in process.)
CONTENT
Through programs such as App Inventor, Scratch, Stencyle, and 3D Printing, participants are exposed to new technologies, build their own understanding, and come to see how to incorporate technology into their classrooms in order to help their students become creators of rather than just users of technology.
Along with content training around technology software, sessions address computational thinking, growth mindset, STEM equity, and social justice all of which become threads for reflection throughout the program experience.
Shona Ramchandani
Aki Shibata-Pliner
Thomas Kalil
Entrepreneur in Residence
I thought the video was very strong in conveying the value of an all-female professional learning community. I'd be interested in knowing more about how the activities like App Inventor or Scratch are used to support computational thinking. Also - what have been the challenges and benefits of making this a multi-generational activity?
Shona Ramchandani
Aki Shibata-Pliner
LinCT Program Manager
Thank you Thomas, this is Aki who facilitates many of LinCT projects meetings with youth and preservice teachers. Scratch and App Inventor are helping us to understand concept (pattern, algorithm, decomposition, Logic...etc) of computational thinking through creating computational thinking approaches, such as creating actual hands-on project, debugging, collaborating, and etc. One thing I have been noticing that Scratch and App inventor projects we are creating, our LinCT female participants shows their perseverance to complete their projects and that is a part of CT approach to problem solving. I would refer to research and evaluation team to pull some quote from participants how they feel about multi-generational learning! Personally I observe multi-generational learning are creating amazing learning opportunity for high schooler as well as college students (age range of 20-40) They are learning from each other developing high schoolers leadership skills, preservice teachers are practicing listening skills as well as understanding different perspective of getting involving with students and how people learn. They learn and work side by side and making strong team together for 2 moths in training time, after that 2 months of learning together, they can use their team skills in summer camp teaching and classroom assisting together. Our activities are ice breaker, team builder, content training, tech training, equity practice, video making, website making, etc.
Shona Ramchandani
Michael Haney
Your own question about how to bridge formal and informal education is quite interesting and undoubtedly your multigenerational groups are part of the strategy. I'm sure that in subsequent years the project will generate more specific models and recommendations. I know you are hoping other educators will provide suggestions to this discussion but later in the week (discourse) it would be interesting to hear some of the ways you think the project will try to bridge this gap.
Shona Ramchandani
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Bridging formal and informal education has been an exciting endeavor for us and we think there may be something here that other informal institutions could consider replicating. As we continue to collect our research and evaluation data I hope that we can come out of this project with a model to share more broadly. A couple of elements that I personally find important are:
Let me know your thoughts, and thank you for your post! Kathryn
Bernadette Sibuma
I enjoyed the video and agree with the other posters that it really shows how creating a safe, non-judgmental place to learn new tech is a valuable component for successful preservice and inservice teacher training.
Can you say more about how you train your teachers to assess student learning of CT with these technologies? Or do the teachers design their own assessments based on the project?
Shona Ramchandani
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Great question Bernadette! Our evaluation team is taking the lead on assessing student learning of CT but we have been working as a larger team (including our museum educators and pre-service teachers) to make personal sense of CT and where we see that across all of our SMM learning experiences.
A primary resource we are using for creating our assessments is from Scratch: http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/index.html
Also, I have found these two articles to be really helpful for grounding us in understanding what CS, CT, and Coding are:
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-12-02-compute...
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-08-06-what-s-...
What is really cool about engaging in this work with the larger museum team is that the whole team is excited about this work and digging into understanding these concepts and how they show up in our programs. In a group meeting two months ago we realized we do a lot with CT and now we have the language to go along with our learning experiences.
Let me know your thoughts, and questions, Kathryn
Shona Ramchandani
Bernadette Sibuma
Thanks for the links, Kathryn! And how exciting that the CT concepts already show up in your programs. I would love to read any writeups you have that map your activities to the CT concepts. Very cool!
Shona Ramchandani
Sarah Carter
Great project! I love the inter-generational nature of the community you've brought together. I'm excited to see this group his impacted the teens and the educators.
Shona Ramchandani
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Thank you Sarah! So excited about co-presenting with you at ASTC this year!
Anna Suarez
Principal
Very interesting project!
The video touched on the use of Scratch and App Inventor in changing and supporting teachers' use of technology in the classroom. Has integrating these programs into preservice education increased use in the classroom?
Shona Ramchandani
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Thank you Anna for your comment and question! As you saw in the video Vanessa has certainly brought her learning and experiences with these programs to her student teaching practices. This was really exciting for me to see and a bit of an unexpected result to see in her student teaching - this means she is also impacting the classroom teacher and school she is at for student teaching! The project did not have the timeline or capacity to follow our pre-service teachers into their future classroom so again, really cool to see this in a student teaching setting.
That all said, we are working with our LinCT pre-service teachers to develop school year learning experiences that the museum will bring to the classroom setting. Using our residency model we have piloted 3 technology based residencies this school year, reaching over 1,000 classroom students. With the resounding positive feedback from the classroom teachers and their students this will be permanent programming going forward into the 2017-18 SY and beyond!
Let me know your thoughts, and additional questions, Kathryn
Shona Ramchandani
Zan Christ
Great job Science Museum of Minnesota!
Shona Ramchandani
Lauren Causey
Senior Evaluation & Research Associate
I appreciate everyone’s interest in our project! I would like to add another illustration of how we expect the pre-service teachers to spread their new knowledge to formal education spaces: The residencies which Kathryn mentions above is the project component which allows the LinCT pre-service teachers to loop back to the formal school environment. This model is described more fully in a January 2017 article published in Connected Science Learning. Link: http://csl.nsta.org/2017/01/modeling-collaborat...
Regarding multi-generational learning, our research findings so far are a little varied. For example, during our benchmarking interviews with the ten initial youth, six of the ten agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I prefer to learn from people who are older than me.” We intend to monitor any changes in those opinions in follow-up interviews with the youth. (During participant observations, we try to monitor other things such as whether youth and pre-service teachers voluntarily sit among one another or whether they separate themselves by age.) It has been a pleasure to work on the project so far and I do look forward to ongoing research and evaluation efforts! LaurenShona Ramchandani
Shona Ramchandani
Thank you for sharing this amazing project and the beautiful journey that the youth and teachers have already completed in just one year! It is inspiring us in the KAYSC to figure out best practices in learning and teaching STEM, and in how to create a collaborative learning community around a strong content delivery model. Let's keep exploring how these collaborations can strengthen our research and our impact to broaden participation and promote equity/inclusion in computational thinking and STEM. Keep up the great work!
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Thank you Shona for your comment! It has been such a great honor to partner with the KAYSC in this deep way through LinCT and as you know, I am just continually impressed with the young women on our LinCT team.
Christine Cunningham
What a great project! I love the multigenerational approach to learning you have employed here. How do you reach out to communities that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM? Have you found that younger LinCT participants become student leaders in their own classrooms?
-Christine
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Thank you for your comment and questions Christine! There are several ways we are reaching communities that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM:
Your second question is a really interesting question - I will have Aki and the eval/research team respond to that inquiry on Monday.
Thank you again, hope you are well, Kathryn
Aki Shibata-Pliner
LinCT Program Manager
Hello Christine,
Thank you for your positive comment and meaningful question. I am going to try to answer to your second question "Have you found that younger LinCT participants become student leaders in their own classrooms?" I have been facilitating LinCT youth for one year. As you might notice in our video, youth mention that they learn to be them and open up for voicing more in our community and beyond. I do not have too much encounter with their classrooms, but your question made me want to ask them that and reflect with them! They have been wanting to lead workshops using technology, and they are always excited about creating spaces for other girls to be enter to STEM filed, such as they lead table activity at museum floor, partnering with Scratch Jr teach at TUFTS university to run family workshops in community library, and some youth have asked me to help them to create after school activities at their own school.
Once again, thank you very much for asking that question, I am sure I will be paying more attention to what they are doing in their own classroom at their school this year!
Anna Suarez
Principal
Kathryn, It may be worthwhile to submit either a supplement request or an ECR proposal to NSF to research some of your unexpected findings or to follow a subset of your preservice teachers to see if they continue to integrate IT once they have their own classrooms. I know that with the CS for ALL program NSF has great interest to learn about how integrating IT into preservice impacts teacher knowledge and practice.
Kathryn Guimond
Director, Department of Learning and Instruction
Thank you for your suggestions Anna, we are certainly hoping to continue this work!
Gretchen Henke
As a preservice teacher and a proud member of LinCT, I find it highly beneficial to learn from a multigenerational approach. As one of the older participants in the program and being part of an early Generation X, the concept of technology and how I wanted to implement STEM felt overwhelming to me. This opportunity to collaborate and learn from my peers brought me practical insight in learning tech skills and how to approach teaching in the classroom. There are many ways to solve a problem, but without a diversity of perspectives from a multigenerational workplace, those solutions may not be thought of, introduced, or considered. The experience of each generation, shape who we are, what we value, how we value it, and how we prioritize those values. I find that younger generations bring fresh insight and energy to a group, while the older generations offer wisdom and insight that comes from experiences and unique perspectives. That depth of experience within LinCT and the workplace gave us more context to what's going on in the world. Everyone's experience is different. Each person adds to the conversation and gives you more exponential opportunities!
Kathryn Guimond
Further posting is closed as the showcase has ended.