Thanks Penny! I will ping the Stanford and EDC folks to have them weigh in with observations. And thanks for picking up on the SEL piece. It really was our amazing LabVenture Educators who added that to the experience because it was so apparent the kids needed it. I guess that's another example of trying to stay fleet of foot and adapt as we went.

Hi Penny, Great question! Our EDC team conducted observations of the LabVenture Express experience last May and we conducted interviews with two teachers whose students had attended this program. One aspect of the program that stood out to us is how quickly the GMRI team was able to adapt programming in ways that stayed true to the interactive and hands on nature of the in-person field trip. For example, GMRI educators engaged the youth in discussions, incorporated polls, and enabled students to examine lobster and trace the sea surface temperature in ways they would have also experienced in person. During a school year when many students are challenged to attend virtual school, we witnessed students actively participating and asking educators questions and manipulating data. One other surprise is that the teachers told us that this opportunity provided a model for their own learning about how to engage students in a virtual environment.  

Hi, Penny. Our Stanford team observed sessions of LabVenture Express, as well as the two Microlabs focused on plankton and lobster, this past February and March. The GMRI team built in multiple avenues and opportunities for the students to participate throughout each of the experiences, so I guess I would have to say that we were more impressed than surprised by the level of engagement exhibited by the students. :) 

As pointed out in the video, each session had an SEL opening question that was shown on the screen as students entered the room (e.g. What is your favorite class? What hobby or skill would you like to learn?). The student could answer in the chat window, and the educators could both respond 1-1 in the chat and also provide some “play-by-play” of the action by verbally sharing out people’s responses (chat between students was disabled).  What did surprise us was hearing from the educators that they felt they actually got to know the students better and had more personal interaction with them in the online experience than during the in-person experience. The educators we talked to attributed this mainly to the chat functionality because it allowed 1) *all* students a safe place to contribute, even the more shy ones who would not normally raise their hands during the in-person experience to ask/answer a question, 2) similar responses from multiple students (vs in-person, where students would drop their hands because “someone else took my answer”), and 3) an easy way to respond quickly to individual students. They also felt that the embedded assessment (Zoom polls and Kahoot games) provided more explicit data on student understanding during various activities and could thus adjust their teaching accordingly.

Great questions, Molly -- thanks for raising them. Interested to hear what others think!

One thing that stood out to me with your work (and other virtual programs I've worked on / seen) is the benefit of direct contact with scientists.  It really seems to humanize us in ways that maybe more formal events haven't in the past.  Cool work!

Agreed 100%. Particularly near-peer scientists -- our post-docs and/or quantitative technicians who are earlier in their careers have had differential impact with students, I think. I also think providing a specific context in which the scientist is featuring their work helps -- it forces the scientist to connect their work to the learning sequence in which students are engaged. Itthe conversation typically doesn't stay put in that arena, but it's a great starting point.

That's a great point about near-peer scientists!  Regarding your discussion question about things we're working to change with our virtual programs, one thing we want to do this year is be more deliberate about building the relationship between a cohort of interns (through smaller group breakout rooms, encouraging offline chat, starting meetings with silly games, etc.).  Does anyone have some things that worked for them for building sustained connections in a virtual world?

I talked to an intern whose mentor had a daily afternoon tea with her group of students.  Virtual, of course.  

Great idea!

You hit an important point spot-on, Karen. Our LabVenture Educators universally said that the virtual environment gave them the opportunity to interact with youth on a much different level than is allowed in the 50-person in-person experience. The chat function -- including private messaging to instructors, which we allowed -- made for a much stronger sense of where kids are getting lost/confused. Kids being kids -- snarky, funny, saucy -- it also made for some HILARIOUS posts that Educators would share with the team after. I'm hoping some of the Educators lurking in the Showcase will weigh in here.

The scientist visits (including a separate Scientist to Go series also offered weekly to a larger crowd of kids across the state) was a huge hit. And, again, seeing their questions to scientists gave us a window into what interests them most about the Gulf of Maine and about STEM. We also pushed ourselves to do some events for specific audiences -- for example, a Scientist to Go session solely for the Tribal schools in Maine that featured Cultural Knowledge Keepers through our partner Wabanaki Youth in Science. These are all things we will be trying to figure out how to offer (and staff/resource) in the coming year. 

Thanks so much for the comments and questions!

Thanks for sharing more about the educators' experience, Leigh. I bet you have staff who are looking forward to analyzing student comments!  I'm impressed by the ways that Scientist to Go sessions (and other programming) were especially responsive to individual communities.  Having a meaningful science experience that resonates in other ways, during a year of challenges, must have been good for the brain and spirit (for researchers and students alike!).  I'm glad to hear that you will continue to build on this work.  Best wishes! 

Great to hear your experience, Holly. We are all going to need to get creative and reflective to figure out what to keep/toss. We are bearing down keenly on the question of: What is the incremental benefit of students being live at a working marine laboratory and how can we push on that benefit even more, even as we are achieving other things virtually.

It's also worth noting that over the past year there hasn't been a single model of "virtual." Last spring we could pretty much count on kids & teachers all being at home. This past year we've seen everything -- from all virtual at home, to split classes (small groups in person while others are at home), to alternating schedules and, recently, back to in person. Figuring out a way to design programming for that mix has been challenging but also caused us to parse and modularize content in ways that might hold affordance going forward.

Just FYI: Wanted to share out a Portion of Online LabVenture Express Experience that you all can play with. Specifically, these are some of the online interactives that were adapted from the in-person experience.These were complemented by activities and discussions run by the Educators as well as session with scientists.

Another point of adaptation and trade-off was that some of the information that is simply presented to students in this version (for example, the thermal habitat displayed as a chart and accompanying text) is deciphered by them in a more inquiry fashion during the in-person experience. Would be interested in thoughts about the challenges of those kinds of trade-offs.

I expect our partners to weigh in so will leave some of your questions for them, Eric. One point of clarification: Only 1 day of the five-day sequence features the scientist(s). The other four are synchronous sessions led by our LabVenture educators using online adaptations of the in-person experience. 

An interesting note about your point on access. The in-person program is 100% free including transportation. So the LabVenture buses travels the state bringing kids from 5+ hours away to GMRI for the experience. This traditional "superhighway" approach turns out to be more equitable than the information superhighway since much of rural Maine does not have reliable broadband. Nevertheless, you are 100% correct that the virtual experience may enable us to reach the ~25-30% of the annual grade cohort we don't currently host in-person.

I've encouraged some of my colleagues to weigh in with their thoughts. The one that comes to mind immediately for me is right up your alley, having to do with the importance of taking a little time for reflection and providing good tools for that reflection. As you know, reflection on the learning (and documenting reflection) is embedded in the in-person experience but it's always under a certain amount of time pressure based on the total time envelope of the experience. In the synchronous virtual experience Educators didn't feel that same pressure and were able to slow down and allow more time for reflection. As is the case for the in-person experience, the online experience produces a "notebook" of what they did (though in much shorter format). Will be interesting to see if we see different kinds/levels of reflection contrasting the two.

One relevant lesson is the value of being able to adapt the program to meet more specific needs of different classrooms, which was necessitated by the changing circumstances this year but was also a bit easier in the virtual environment. As we look toward a return to the in-person experience, we are thinking about how to build in that flexibility, both in the educator-facilitated segments and the content on our digital touch tables.

Another lesson is the value of low-barrier, embedded assessment in the online experience (via Zoom polling and Kahoot games) that provided the GMRI educators with "live" data on students' understanding and allowed them to quickly address misunderstandings during or very soon after the actual activity.

Thanks for the question, Perrin. I hope some of my colleagues will weigh in with their perspectives. At the most general level, adapting to the wide variety of teaching schedules and scenarios was quite a hurdle. Where the in-person program is rigorously scheduled for two time slots a day, the virtual program required adaptation to all different combinations of in-person/virtual, days of the week and time slots into which teachers wanted the program to fit, and of course broadband access (as you well know is a challenge in Maine). I'll let the Educators speak to the challenges of instruction itself.

I agree with Leigh that scheduling an accommodating the various restrictions that each school had presented challenges that took some creative thinking. It was also I change for our educators to get use to so much screen time. We all missed the energy of seeing students in person but as mentioned above the positive side of that was being able to interact with the student one on one via chat helped us learn quickly where sticking points were.

Great to hear from you, Elizabeth -- we love the NOAA Ocean Exploration team! Our professional development programs didn't skip a beat, really, as they shifted to virtual this year. Perhaps the strong context of "virtual everything everywhere" made it easier to implement and experiment with. I suspect we'll all be working to devise hybrid models going forward. This fall our regional peer teacher communities (serving primarily the rural corners of the state) will have a hybrid version of what is usually a statewide in-person launch. A virtual event with everyone followed by local in-person meet-ups and doing some hands-on science locally. We'll see how it goes.

Maybe the spirit of courageous experimentation at meeting constituents' needs will be the lasting silver lining to the pandemic.

Completely agreed, Susan. We would love to do that research! And, yes, providing free transportation has been at the heart of equitable access to the program since 2005. Of course, equitable access doesn't mean equitable outcomes and that continues to be a key challenge we work on each year. Thanks for your note!

Schools and educators can participate in our virtual and in-person programing at no cost to the schools/teachers/students. We do this to ensure that cost is not a barrier to participation, we are very thankful to our sponsors for helping us make that happen!

Hi Sue! I am on the LabVenture team at GMRI and have gotten the chance to work with many of the different school groups over the last year, and we have noticed some differences with students working less in groups. Throughout the program we have created space for some group check ins, where they can compare their data as a group and share their ideas in the chat. This helps replicate some of that feeling of working together, but it is missing in other areas. This is balanced out with the chat in some ways though, as students are more willing to ask questions or for clarifications when they can do it discretely from their peers. 

It was really challenging in the beginning to make handling the live lobster engaging and interactive over Zoom. We encourage student questions and engagement in the chat throughout this part of the experience, and try to do exactly what you said. We have students enter the data that they are collecting in a Zoom poll at the end so that they can compare it to their classmates, and ultimately decide if their lobster is legal to keep. We then play a game of Kahoot where they apply the knowledge that they learned from that part. It is definitely different than it is in the Cohen Center, but students do still get excited about the experience and seem to enjoy it!

Unfortunately we didn't, Tim, but we are hoping we might still be able to do that since we hope to continue virtual programming. That said, I think evaluation targeting a head-to-head comparison of in-person and virtual would have to be terribly nuanced since the affordances and potential learning outcomes of the two are a venn diagram, not a direct overlap. But still work we believe we have a cool opportunity to pursue. Thanks for bringing it up, Tim!

Thanks for the question, Lara (and good to see our UNH/Leitzel neighbors in the house!). In the program presented in the video, we've played around with clicker-based systems as well as more old fashioned surveys and interviews. We even had one amazing volunteer (a retired teacher) observe thousands of kids using an observation protocol focused on engagement. None of these is perfect by any stretch. Going forward, we're building embedded assessments into the system, which of course changing many of the activities to be designed to support assessment. Finally -- we've developed a routine and expectation that students in this program write "thank you" notes to our sponsors/funders. It's the only "cost" of attending. We receive copies of all the notes and they have become an interesting source of data as well. Admittedly, they often reveal quite a bit of coaching by the teachers so, again, are far from perfect. It's a real challenge!

Thanks for such a thorough response! I would love to hear more about your embedded assessments at some point. How fortunate you had a volunteer who was able to collect thousands of observations. That's a true gift! We also engage volunteers in a variety of UNH Extension and Sea Grant programs. So it gets me thinking!

Yes I popped over to your video but didn't have a chance to post yet! Love the incorporation of volunteers as a support for elementary teachers and CitSci. Brilliant! Happy to talk about embedded assessments any time!

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