Dear Sue,

We are working with our high school partners on Hands-on STEM, are there any materials, resources, or videos you can share with us?

Greetings Cristo

We will be offering free workshops this spring and summer if you or your educators are interested in accessing our materials and resources.

We could also talk more at length about our coaches training your high school partners.

Feel free to reach out to me at pchick@mmsa to talk about what is available for free this spring and summer and what packages are available next fall.

Perrin

Thanks Marcia, actually I think your project on connecting climate change to racial justice could translate really well into the afterschool space! Many youth development organizations are looking for creative ways to be anti-racist in their programs, and looking at data is a great way to focus the conversation. 

Jennifer we are offering free workshops this spring to help educators and free coaching cohorts this summer. Be sure to check out our offerings at https://mmsa.org/projects/acres/join-a-cohort/.

When giving our educators tips and tricks related to remote engagement, we also talk about equity and resources. Our activity suggestions often only use materials easily found at home. We never say people need to have certain items, but instead, encourage them to find something that is similar.

One of my favorite engineering activities is to have participants find 5 items that are smaller than the size of their hand and not breakable. We then try to have them build towers from those materials. It is a great way to get to know each other even though we are virtual, allows them to practice the skill of asking purposeful questions, and learn more about the engineering process. 

One time I had someone bring a hair tye, a piece of paper, a shoe, a plastic cup, and a toothbrush. We had much fun seeing how many different ways we could put those items together into different towers and more importantly the educators were able to practice asking questions that really encouraged everyone to clarify their thinking and to understand the redesign process.

Hope that one suggestion illustrates how virtual learning can be hands-on and accessible. 

Perrin

Greetings Remy

Recruitment is hard certainly. We designed the ACRES project to connect with educators who were geographically and socially isolated; we set out originally to reach rural OST educators. Over the years, our audience expanded and our recruitment efforts changed a bit. It certainly helped to share testimonials from past participants we recruited new audiences.

We were fortunate to have connected with and nurtured some great partners over the five years and they have helped us recruit. We worked with the National Afterschool Association, Development Without Limits, the Afterschool networks associated with The Mott Network and various states, and The STEM Next Foundation. We have leveraged connections with 4H and libraries too. In several cases co-branding, our marketing materials, with these partners helped us recruit.

As we look to scaling up, it is really knowing the needs of our partners that has positioned us well to continue this work and build upon past recruitment efforts. Our external evaluator did some analysis of our recruitment efforts and related to our partnerships halfway through our grant. I am happy to share some of those insights with you off-line if that is helpful. 

Perrin

Thanks Remy for your comment and excellent question. 

We've learned that the afterschool and library worlds are incredibly diverse in their organizational structures and where they fit into the larger learning ecosystem, which makes it hard to do a one-size-fits-all strategy. We recruit at all levels opportunistically: individuals, youth development organizations, city networks, state and national networks. Also we've learned do lots of small "taster" workshops because people need to experience this to get a sense of it. We go as "presenters" or "exhibitors" to many practitioner conferences (in-person or virtual) where we try to connect to folks who are already interested in supporting professional learning with their staff.

Also we've learned that personal recommendations are critical in this field - we have most success when we have buy-in from both the senior administrators and the educators. After all, the educators need to be willing to be vulnerable for the sake of their own learning, and the administrators need to see enough value in it to pay their staff time to participate. (though many do volunteer, it's a lot to ask of these folks).

Our reach has been hugely amplified by support from STEM Next, one of our major funders. They advocate for us with the other projects and networks they support. For example, they have directed our way many Mott state afterschool networks who have signed up to participate in their "Million Girls Moonshot" engineering initiative and need PD to support their staff - it's perfect synergy because we can coach them in exactly the skills and mindset they want to learn, and the funder sees even greater impact.

Thanks, Sabrina! Using WhatsApp as an assessment medium sounds really cutting edge. We've been using Flipgrid for the past couple of years as a central location for educators to share the videos they record of their practice and respond to each other asynchronously. As we started to have success with that, we realized the potential for participants to reflect and share feedback about the ACRES sessions in short video form. Now at the end of ACRES sessions, educators will turn off Zoom and immediately leave a minute-long video or audio clip on Flipgrid sharing their takeaways and feedback while it's fresh, and without needing to type something up. We also love that Flipgrid will quickly generate a transcript for our researchers!

Hannah, Flipgrid sounds like a terrific way of capturing feedback quickly without much burden for the educators.  And at the same time, you get the most salient or memorable feedback in real time.  I hope a lot of evaluators learn about this technique---it's a great methodological contribution to the field!

Hi Hannah, Thank you for sharing your methods of capturing feedback with Flipgrid. I agree with Jan-- this provides one less thing for educators to follow-up with and ensures you get the most memorable feedback on time! Do you find the Flipgrid transcripts pretty accurate? I'm curious because we have been using software like Amazon Transcribe and it would be nice to work with more programs/apps that have integrated automated transcription. Thank you! 

Certainly! I've never used Amazon Transcribe, so I'm not sure I can compare the accuracy, but Flipgrid's transcriptions are decent. I would say they are a close second to Otter, another one we've used.

I love this dialogue! I agree with Perrin about the innovation of using the WhatsApp platform as a means to gather feedback, and then the use of FlipGrid as well. I will definitely pass this along to the facilitators the host post-PD workshops as part of our Deep Dives virtual PD miniseries (I am assuming they are aware of FlipGrid, but the use of WhatsApp is definitely new to me at least!).

Thanks Eric. Great question about downstream impacts... I wish we knew! Maybe we dig into that into the next phase...

One thing we do know is that there's quite a bit of cross-pollination from the educator side: quite a few of the afterschool educators also have roles in classrooms (as teachers, aides, ed techs, etc.) and they often report finding the facilitation skills just as useful in the formal setting. In fact the amount of spontaneous transfer amazed us - over 90% of our long-term follow-up interviewees said that they were using the facilitation skill in other settings - teaching social studies or reading, running a ceramics studio, doing activities with their own kids, etc.

We published a piece in Connected Science Learning on how the approach seems helpful in schools. Here's the link: 

https://www.nsta.org/connected-science-learning-january-february-2021/virtual-coaching-plcs-and-out-school

Thanks Jan! We'd love to talk with them. I'll follow up with you offline.

Thanks, Liz! As an ACRES coach, it is an honor to work alongside informal educators as they explore these STEM facilitation skills and then put them into practice with their youth. The depth of reflection and willingness to be vulnerable by sharing their practice is remarkable. 

Leigh it's been so rewarding to work with educators all across the country, especially during COVID. Their stories and our conversations shared during our ACRES cohorts illustrate how creative, resourceful, and resilient the field is and all of the coaches feel so fortunate to do the work we do. Everyone truly enjoys the sessions because they are live and very interactive despite being virtual and because we put connecting first. We often say we are not looking for perfect practice, nor perfect educators (so let your cats walk across the screen and it is ok for your kids to interrupt you), but instead we are looking for real ways to connect and reflect so we can all learn and feel a little less alone and overwhelmed. 

Perrin

Greetings Daniel 

Thanks for your questions. I am so proud of our efforts to reach across the whole country. You can check out our map of impact here https://mmsa.org/projects/acres/. To summarize we have reached participants in 39 states. Our recruitment efforts are supported by our fabulous partners, like the Missouri Afterschool Network, the Illinois Afterschool Network,  The Alaska Afterschool Network, The Mott Foundation, The STEM NEXT foundation, and the National Afterschool Association......We advertise our offerings through listservs, sending out flyers to our contacts, social media posts, and by reaching out to past participants and asking them to help spread the word.  Perrin

Thanks for the insight, Perrin!

Thanks Raffaella. Seeing some of your videos is very heartening - we've converged on some very similar strategies in supporting teachers as they learn informally from each other and a coach. 

You all are fantastic, grateful to be welcomed again and again. Asking Purposeful Questions is my all-time favorite. 

Hi Barbara, and thank you for your insight. Yes I think purpose is folded into our program at several scales. On the smaller scale, a foundational skill we coach is how to ask youth "purposeful questions" during STEM activities, and we learned that many educators had never even considered that they could have an intentional purpose for their activities, or that this could be a driver behind their interactions with youth. On the larger scale, many educators were quite moved by the simple (but infrequent) opportunity to come together to share with each other the challenges & solutions they faced, as defined by them, especially when the pandemic hit. I'm always inspired by afterschool educators' deep intentions to supporting and empowering youth, so I think mostly our role is just to offer some ways to act on those intentions using some practical pedagogical strategies they may not have considered.