Thank you so much, Deb!  Looking forward to working with you more in the future.

Thanks for sharing your work, Eric--we agree that storytelling is a powerful tool regardless of age. Your documentary looks fascinating!  Looking forward to watching it.

Sure thing.  It's not my work, but some colleagues in Cleveland. 

Thank you, Susan! Our plans for PD are still emerging, and have been thrown for a bit of a loop by the pandemic. We are trying to design online PD that strongly supports teachers' learning needs, including those related to experiencing the power of story in a STEM learning context, generative dialogue with peer learners, and access to curriculum designers and content experts who can answer questions and provide feedback. How we do this, at least in the short term, depends somewhat on the capacity of our partnering district and teachers. Some of my other colleagues will likely want to give a more detailed response, and we will also be very happy to follow up as things become clearer. 

Hi Susan, As Becky mentioned, we're still in the planning phase when it comes to online PD.  We're planning on having some combination of:

• videos that explain the learning theory behind our project
• videos for teachers that accompany each unit/lesson and cover major concepts and logistics
• some kind of meaningful PD experience for teachers who are just starting out with TEEMS--potentially something synchronous, or at least something interactive.

Length of time would probably depend on the format of the PD--if it's something synchronous I can imagine it being a half-day or a full day (with some work offline); otherwise I think it would probably be shorter.  We hope to find ways to foster community among educators, but I think that's sometimes challenging given what teachers already have on their plates.

Do you have experience planning or implementing online PD? If so, we'd love to hear about things you've found challenging or effective!

We have been working to transform a face-to-face video-based analysis-of-practice PD model for online delivery. We've had the most success when we think really carefully about the rich interactions teachers have in the face-to-face environment, and then select the tools and activities to try to replicate those interactions online. We use a mix of asynchronous work (teachers working on their own between video conferences) and two-hour video conferences.  Another critical piece is designing the questions and assignments that allow us as facilitators to uncover areas of confusion for teachers before a video-conference, and then tailoring the video-conference to attend to the issues of greatest need for the teachers. It has been a long journey, but we are seeing some promising early results.

Great points, Susan, which resonated with me as I've gone to remote teaching this semester!  The social nature of teaching and learning is hard to replace or replicate online, and successful strategies for meaningful online PD will be valuable.  Loved your project video--many similarities between our projects.  

Hi Annie!  Thanks for swinging by!  Just watched the video on your project and commented that we should connect about success and challenges in implementation in SPS as well as assessment instruments and outcomes.

Hi Beth - I am a co-PI on the CS4All Springfield Project and a Professor at the College of Ed at UMass, Amherst. I'd love to connect with you about the TEEMS project and some of your team's idea about moving PD forward online. I've been a bit familiar with this project when it was in CT. You have some great partners in Al and Glenn from Smith. The idea of rooting engineering in stories about design disasters and biomimicry are really motivating for kids! A great project.

Hi Florence. (is one allowed to just say 'hi' in this context?). I hope we can collaborate around some of this work. Always hearing great things about your work at UMass.

Hi Al! Great to see this latest manifestation of your work. I love the story-based approach your group has taken in CT and now here in Springfield. I'd love to chat with you more about this work and find ways to collaborate. 

Great to see you online, Becky! Yes, let's have our projects share ideas about online PD. What a crazy time. I love the TEEMS project - imaginative education! yay.

Hi Mary! Thanks for the great questions! For the pilot year, we were working with a relatively small group of about 6 schools, but we hope to expand that over the next year.

All of our resources are available for free online at http://goteems.com (our curriculum) and at http://teemsproject.com (a resource site for teachers which includes lesson guides). We’ve tried to make make the curriculum as versatile as possible for educators. A computer or a phone is needed to watch the videos, but no software is needed. Our other resources can be accessed through the websites and either projected on a screen or printed. 

In addition to the 1 engineering unit and 5 lessons already available, we have one additional unit and one lesson in the works that we will be adding to the site before the end of this summer.  The unit will focus on materials and biomimicry and the lesson centers around waves. Let us know if you’d like any additional details! :)

Thanks for your kind words and your question!  We had hoped to run an in-person professional development workshop with teachers from our implementing schools last summer, but unfortunately conflicting schedules didn't allow us to do so.  Instead, we sent out resource packets to teachers, and then I met with each one individually to talk about the project.  I also met with teachers periodically throughout this year to get informal feedback, answer questions, and bring them new lessons as we developed them.

Our plan was to host an in-person PD workshop this summer, but that again looks unlikely.  However, it was part of our grant that in years 3-4, we would develop online PD.  We have moved up the timeline for that and plan to spend this summer developing resources, including videos that explain major ideas from each unit/lesson, videos that cover the logistics of each unit/lesson, etc.  We may also try to host a remote, synchronous workshop.

We'd love to hear your ideas if you have any to share: what do you think is particularly important for teacher/leader professional development, especially if delivered remotely?

If I were doing this for the first time, I'd love to engage in the program, collaborate with colleagues who are also a part of the project, chat with folks like you, and look at classroom videos of design challenges & student work. I do like the idea of a remote, synchronous workshop. 

I appreciate you had follow-up and informal conversations. I know it isn't the most sexy data, but it is so important. 

Thank you for this advice!!--and yes, absolutely agreed about informal conversations.  We learned a lot from teachers about what worked and didn't work, where we needed to provide more information or support, etc.  I always think about teachers as the "superheroes," and our job as giving them the tools that allow them to be creative and maximize their talents.

Hi Lynda, thanks for visiting! In our work, one of the major theories we’re implementing in this project is called Imaginative Education (IE), which was developed by educational researcher Kieran Egan. A great overview of IE is provided by CIRCE (Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Imagination) at http://ierg.ca/about-us/a-brief-guide-to-imaginative-education/. IE involves using stories – appropriate to the students’ age and development -- that engage their emotions and imaginations. We have found this to be a powerful way of providing students with context and the ability to make meaning out of their learning experience.  In IE, stories that most engage middle-schoolers include elements such as extremes of reality, heroism, and a sense of mystery – all of which we incorporate into the storylines that are the backbone of each unit and lesson. While we didn’t intentionally draw from the rich storytelling in Native American Culture, I would love to hear more about your work and any thoughts you might have about how our approach could best resonate with and engage Indigenous youth.

Reinforcing what Sonia has mentioned and highlighting an insight you had, Lynda, the theory of Imaginative Education does seem to me to dovetail very meaningfully with storytelling practices represented in the Indigenous teaching and learning context.

And there's a bit of research already out there to back up this position: In 2005, there was some research carried out in British Columbia that looked at implementing Imaginative Education at schools within the Stó:lõ, Haida and Ts’msyen First Nations communities. If you're interested in looking into it further, I'd recommend as a starting point Nielsen's (2010) article Lost in translation? which provides a summary of the Learning for Understanding through Culturally-Inclusive Imaginative Development (LUCID) project.

All this is to say, working with Indigenous communities is something that does seem like good fit and it's something that's been on our radar in a broad sense. :)

Thank you for your kind words, Brian. Narrative really is important for orienting students to engage with the problem-solving processes that are embedded in engineering design. The challenge is always to create the kind of interaction that allows students to explore and discuss solutions meaningfully as they work through their process. It can be a lot of work -- particularly when there's conceptual matter that doesn't necessarily lend itself to the kinds of narratives that middle school students will approach easily -- but our development team does a great job of finding that balance.

Thanks so much for your encouraging comments - and I'm delighted to hear that students are still reading and enjoying Talk to Me! Yes, we've begun taking steps toward transitioning to a remote delivery.  As we talked about above, we're working on developing online PD with video tutorials and support on the logistics of delivering the content. We're also looking at how our online, transmedia resources for students could be used by students at home, with less direct teacher guidance. We've just started trying this out (if you're interested, we're experimenting at teemscurriculum.wordpress.com).  We're continuing to brainstorm this transition - and definitely will be seeking input from teachers on the kinds of resources that would work best for them and on what makes a workable remote lesson. (And we would be very appreciative of any words of advice you might have, here or separately!)

Thank you, Christine! Yes, the STEM identity part of the project is particularly exciting to me – as a one-time chemical engineer who never felt a sense of self-efficacy or community during my education or employment in that field. But seeing so many great projects in this showcase that recognize the need to engage student populations that are often neglected – that is very heartening!

Hi Jessica! I wanted to complement Isabel's response to your question with a bit of information about how we're looking at how we're looking at the effect of TEEMS on students' identities:

As part of our overall research plan, we're looking at elements related to students' self-reported STEM identity development -- these would be indicators like engineering self-efficacy and development of career awareness.

We're also exploring identity development in classroom observations by looking at cognitive engagement. This gets a little more directly at what you've mentioned -- that we can capture students' efforts to demonstrate their engagement (through sharing, creating, reflecting, and discourse) in an authentic setting as they're experiencing the learning narratives.

Hi Isabel - Thank you for your thoughtful response. These are great connections. Any time we can engage students in using engineering to solve problems that matter to them, I get very excited. Sometimes problems matter because students discover them in their homes and communities. Other times I think you can provide a context that fosters that sense of ownership and relevance. It sounds like you are finding some creative ways to do that. I'm looking forward to following this work. 

Hi! As the project's evaluator, I want to briefly chime in about the issue of student's STEM/engineering identity. One thing project designers are very aware of is the fragility and/or lack of student's understanding of what engineers do/how they contribute to society -- a fundamental precursor to forming a sense of engineering identity. Therefore, part of the project's theory of change is related to immersing students very explicitly (through story, and through other instructional strategies) in the language and practice of engineering, and specifically ways that engineers contribute meaningfully to people's (or animal's) lives. Then there is a self-efficacy component (i.e., am I capable of participating in engineering), and our theory is that this are more likely to emerge/develop through experiences that require high levels of cognitive engagement. That's it in a nutshell -- happy to talk more about this if you have questions and/or ideas!  

Thank you so much, Eric!