Welcome!

MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation in Santa Barbara, California, is a new museum that was designed to engage visitors of all ages in constructing understanding of STEM topics through interactive engagement in STEM practices. Exhibits have multiple entry points and allow for a range of learning goals. Engaging visitors in STEM practices requires a different approach to facilitation than more traditional content-based museum experiences. To support visitor learning, we developed the practice-based facilitation model. Practice-based facilitation includes strategies for observing visitors, identifying the STEM practices they are engaging in, and making decisions about whether to prompt visitors to optimize their use of a specific STEM practice, expand the visitor’s use of other STEM practices, or change the level of sophistication of their engagement with the exhibit. This model requires training staff to observe visitors and make facilitation decisions. 

We developed a year-long informal STEM facilitator training program. The participants of this training program enter as a cohort and go through the program together, culminating in a professional Certificate in Informal STEM Learning, awarded through the University of California, Santa Barbara. The program has two interrelated components: (1) Part-time paid work as a MOXI facilitator and (2) Coursework directly tied to their work at MOXI. The participants interact with visitors at exhibits on the museum floor and through activities at program carts and educational programs. They also work with students in schools during outreach programs and field trip programs.

We are investigating the facilitator learning and visitor experience and are developing short modules from our training program that can be replicated in other institutions. We are currently recruiting staff at other informal science institutions to test these modules in early 2022. If you are interested in using the modules for staff training and providing feedback please let us know in the comments. You can visit our project website for more information and links to publications at https://moxi.education.ucsb.edu/moxi-apprentice-program. If you or someone you know are interested in joining the next MOXI Apprentice Program cohort, see https://www.moxi.org/explore/apprentice-program for more details.

Are the modules available online?

 Hi Ron!

Chicago Children's Museum is looking to open this summer. I would love to hear more about using the modules for staff training. I was able to take your half day training at the last in-person ASTC, and had a blast!

This is fantastic!  This really highlights the value of informal STEM education and how impactful the interactions can be.  I wonder if any of your graduates will consider STEM teaching as a result of their experiences.  Well done.

Thank you for this presentation, and congratulations on your approach to integrating research and practice in a way that honors the wisdom of practitioners' observations while drawing on knowledge from scholarship. Were there particular studies of any others, or theory that informed the framework that you are using? 

Good to see this video. As you already know, I am a big fan of this project. After being on pause for a year, our floor facilitation program is starting back up at AMNH. We have a group of ten college students starting this summer and the training period is the month of June. We are planning to incorporate what we have learned from you in terms of the matrix of engagement levels and practices of science for select exhibits in our new Gems and Minerals Hall and also our Hall of Planet Earth. Expect an email from me asking for advice and support!

Wow! The apprentice program is really great. I love that it is hands on and engages learners at the site. I am glad that you are starting again soon. This looks like an excellent STEM training program and I bet apprentices go on to do really interesting careers!

So interesting, Ron. Would love to hear more about this. We are thinking a lot about how we can enact and study specific teaching practices in the context of a science museum, and also what it looks like to bring in culturally relevant frameworks to that work. Would love to hear more about the frameworks you are using to select and choose the practices you focus upon. A practice-based facilitation model sounds like it has a lot of connection to the preparation of teachers through a focus on practice; was that also an influence? This sounds wonderful and so influential. 

This seems like a really fantastic program - congratulations! What advice would you have for programs that would like to engage with the general public in this way, provide professional development to volunteers, but that do not have the ability to recruit volunteers for this level of time commitment/investment in training? For example - our volunteers are often only coming in to work for an event with the public that is a 4 hour shift once a year. We'd love to have deeper and more meaningful engagement in our exhibit and content (and stronger training for the volunteers), but 36 hours of training for a 4 hour volunteer opportunity isn't feasible. Is there a way to scale this? 

Fascinating project and I love MOXI's focus on the practices of the STEM disciplines. Have you considered having classroom teachers go through the training (in addition to what Danielle is doing bringing it into preservice coursework)? We are playing with this -- supporting classroom teachers' understanding of the practices using our informal space and then thinking through the translation back to the classroom. I know many informal institutions do this kind of thing, but your focus on practices has unique potential!

Thanks for your question Leigh. Danielle and Ron may want to talk more about classroom teachers going through the MAPS training. In addition to the preservice coursework that Danielle mentions above, she is also currently Co-PI of a Noyce grant in which both preservice Noyce scholars  (completing single subject credentials in STEM) and undergraduate Noyce Interns (with interest in pursuing a minor in education) experience a museum placement (as well as one in a high school engineering academy) to foster their own understandings of the practices and learning about how to engage students with them.

This is a fantastic video! The research-practitioner partnership is so important for developing effective learning opportunities in museum settings. I especially love that the MOXI facilitation staff are able to use paid work hours to consistently develop facilitation skills and that the program is presented as an "apprenticeship." I also thought it was great that you had facilitators read research articles during this program. I will look forward to hearing more about your work in the future, especially when this training program reaches a point where it can be shared with other museums!

In the work I've done in museums, I've seen that facilitators are sometimes hesitant to participate in research or worry that being documented/recorded will negatively affect their job. How did you approach facilitation staff and get them excited about actively participating in research? 

This practice based facilitation model is absolutely the right answer for informal ed spaces looking for a solution to sustainable recruitment and retention. As you are building out options for those with much smaller commitments, have you been able to reach out to other informal education providers that are not museums or science centers?

Excellent project, thank you for sharing your work!  Could you speak more about how you chose and prioritized topics to focus on during the coursework portion of the training?  Did you conduct a needs assessment to inform your program design?  If so, I'm curious as to what your learned.  Thank you!

Hi Elysa,

We initially conducted a survey of experts in the field (museum CEOs, Education Directors, Researchers) about what they thought were the most important practices for facilitators to develop in a training program. In parallel to that survey we began to focus on how our museum visitors engaged in STEM practices at our exhibits and also what engagement with practices was possible at each exhibit. We then studied how different facilitation techniques affected outcomes for our visitors and created a framework for facilitation (see the Journal of Museum Education article on our project website for details). We drew on many studies and frameworks from both formal and informal education including the Ambitious Science Teaching framework (Windshitl et al.), Visitor Context (Falk and Dierking), and Active Prolonged Engagement (Exploratorium). In addition, we connected with an amazing improvisational theater teacher early on and began adapting improv training for our facilitators. The curriculum in our yearlong training program has been modified each year (of the four years we have operated the program) to incorporate what we have learned and adjust and improve the curriculum.

This year we have distilled our curriculum into three 12-hour training modules that we will test at other informal learning institutions in 2022. These modules build on each other to develop Practice-based Facilitation techniques through workshop-style training such that new-hire visitor-facing floor staff could be up and running with the first module (4 3-hour sessions, or 6 2-hour sessions, or even 2 6-hour sessions). Subsequent modules could build on that training for more senior visitor-facing floor staff and/or back of house staff.