Hi everyone!

Our video summarizes our Nanoscience Summer Institute for Middle School Teachers (NanoSIMST), where over four days teachers go through a crash course in nanoscience. We focus on combining nanoscience content and practical pedagogy so teachers can bring it back to their classrooms. Please learn more about our facilities and programs here: https://nanolabs.stanford.edu/

We are thrilled to chat with you all this week and answer any questions you may have about our project, and interested in hearing about you and your project!

Dear Angela and the Summer Institute Team,

Congratulations on such an exciting project. It's clear that the teachers deeply enjoyed this immersive experience!

Given the diversity of activities within this program, I am curious to know more about what you feel are the "critical elements" of this professional development experience. Is it the on-campus experience and exposure to practicing scientists and the lab, the hands-on activities, or something else? Boiling down what is essential for others to know could make this approach replicable (or help them to know if it is replicable in their context).

I am also curious to know more about the classroom-level impact. Do you have any data on teacher implementation of the activities or pedagogical approaches they learned in the workshop? (Or, perhaps, anecdotes of teachers who have developed and modified these activities and approaches for their work?) I also wonder if the program provides any kind of long-term support beyond the 4 days on campus.

Thank you for sharing this great video!

Hi Angela and team, great work! Wondering if you have any stats and insights to share on specifics of how teachers have leveraged their experiences with nanolabs, within the K-12 classroom.  Looks like lots of possibilities, and I'm curious to know how applications of the summer institute have (1) been leveraged; and (2) plans for scale so as to bring lessons of application to other teachers around the world. Thanks!

Hi Dave, thanks for the comment! Our teachers have been able to bring this experience back to the classroom, adapt these lessons into their own curriculum, and some have even dedicated entire units. We offer follow up guest speakers and tours to the teacher alumni, and serve as a resource for their nanoscience questions. As for scaling, we have helped Georgia Tech implement the same program, and hope to bring this workshop online this summer due to shelter in place restrictions. Thanks!

The video shows that you had a very successful summer institute with enthusiastic teachers who are very likely to find ways to implement what they have learned in their classrooms. Obviously nanotechnology is a very timely topic that deserves to make inroads into schools. 

The question of scale raised earlier is a good one since summer workshops for teachers are an excellent opportunity for developers and researchers to learn what teachers know and what they need to know to update their content and be able to teach new topics.  But it doesn't scale well.  On the other hand, there are many ways that these teachers experiences could be shared broadly.  The participating teachers  could share the lessons they develop over the first few years in an online library, maybe with some technical help from the project staff.  If the project materials are made available, then these teachers could become resources for other teachers who do not have access to summer workshops.  If there are generally accepted nano-related materials available elsewhere, maybe these could be aggregated for teachers beyond those in the summer workshop.  

The bottom line is that this is an exciting project that could be important to a much broader audience, I encourage you to look for strategies to scale this to many more teachers.

Hi Angela, the video conveys the level of excitement among the participating teachers and their appreciation for the experience. You mentioned that the workshop provided opportunities for teachers to create NGSS-aligned lessons. Could you say more about how you supported the development of these lessons? Have you tracked how these lessons align to the three dimensions of the standards? I agree that it will be very interesting to track implementation of these lessons. 

This is such an important area of science that many people are not really aware of, even though nanotech affects everything we touch in modern life- clothing, medicine, food handling. I like how it is a wonderful way to provide a context of integrated STEM, such as the relation of volume and surface area of big and very small objects. Thank you for shaing this project and doing this work with teachers.

Are you familiar with the Nevada Mathematics Project? There are some nice parallels and I encourage you to reach out to Prof. Teruni Lamberg and her statewide PD around STEM integration (nanotech is one of their content areas) if you find the connections helpful.

http://nevadamathproject.com/