Thanks for watching our video, April! Our educators have been amazing at integrating multiple disciplines into their engineering in the garden units. 

Thanks for your questions, Kathy!

• In terms of classroom teachers working in and outside the classroom, with the Designing Trellises unit educators spent time outside building and testing designs. In the classroom, they had students develop and revise designs and engage in sensemaking conversations about how trellis designs worked, why, and which designs to install in the garden. Through these conversations students built science ideas about balanced forces in addition to their discussions about engineering process. 
• Our program is just ending and we don't have a plan for continued support, but it's a great idea. Many of the participants have expressed excitement to teach their unit again next fall and to think about other engineering in the garden units they might design in the future. We would love to continue learning from these educators' creativity! 
• We don't have plans to expand the program to other states. However, all of the resources from the Designing Trellises unit and tools for planning your own engineering in the garden unit will be freely available this summer so people can take up and build on these materials. 

Thanks for watching our video, Michael! Facilitating 3D learning definitely involves "being in the mess" and working with the unknown of what students will bring. We focused this phase of the work on developing the program and evaluating teacher learning. So, we aren't measuring student outcomes now. However, if we scale up the work in the future, we are very interested in student-level growth!

Thanks for watching our video and sharing it, Margo! We are excited for folks to explore and build on these materials. 

A few of the things we emphasized in professional learning to support teacher's comfort with the "messiness" were 1) developing classroom norms at the start of the unit and revisiting them frequently to help with group work and shared decision making and, 2) setting up the design goal as a classroom endeavor (e.g. we're trying to figure out a trellis design that will support our peas, rather than who has the "best" design). Engineering is challenging social work where learners need to listen to each other's ideas and make decisions for a shared purpose. Those supports seemed to help teachers feel more comfortable finding their way alongside their students. 

For our design process, we built on Kristen Wendell and her colleague's excellent work and we included design phases of unpack the problem, ideate and research, create and test, evaluate, and communicate, which don't necessarily follow in that specific order. We also included a suite of flexible design activities within those phases, such as define criteria and constraints, give and receive feedback, sketch, explain designs, and make decisions.

TILLAGE is an acronym for the title of the grant that funded this work: Teacher Learning and Leadership through Agricultural Engineering. When we finished this video, we realized that Engineering in the Garden would be more descriptive and user friendly but we'd already set up the website.  :)

Thanks for the comments and questions Christine! We did sit in on the virtual study group sessions where teachers shared their experiences of implementing the unit with students. It was very informative for us to hear first hand the successes and struggles the teachers and students had. We are incorporating what we heard into our project evaluation work and if we scale up the work in the future we will defiantly be using what we learned from the virtual sessions.

Thanks for watching our video, Laura! We are excited for students to see themselves as part of and contributing to the gardens at their schools in new ways. 

Thanks for the comments and questions Latrenda! One of the participating schools is located in a food desert, which I agree makes it even more applicable to students learning agriculture and seeing the benefits of being able to grow their own food from a young age. While we didn't visit the schools when teachers were implementing the unit we did hear a lot of feedback from the teachers. They expressed some surprise at how well students worked together, collaboratively designing and building (not that it was all so easy going all the time though). While we don't have plans to extend the unit yet, collaborating with community gardens would be an interesting way to extend the work outside school gardens.

Hi Nichole, from listening to the teachers and reading some of their feedback we've seen a lot of benefits from the hands-on aspects of the unit. Students have been excited to draw out a sketch of their own design knowing they will get to build a model of it, and potentially a full size trellis. They also get really interested and excited to go out into the garden! The hands on aspects of building, testing and planting not only seems to increase their agency but also their interest and motivation in engineering and agriculture! While our evaluation focused on the teachers, it would be really interesting to collect data on the effects of these hand-on units on students interest and motivation to learn more engineering and agriculture. 

Hi Francheska, Thanks for watching and for your questions!

We included some supports for emergent multilingual learners in the Designing Trellises unit. Educators "give" students some words they need to be able to engage in the task before starting.  For example, to participate in group work, students all need to be able to talk about the trellis, the bamboo, twine. In contrast, students "earn" some conceptual words after making sense of ideas in lessons using everyday language. For example, after students build prototypes and talk about how the sticks need to push on each other, then students are introduced to conceptual ideas like forces and balance. Similarly, students are introduced to criteria after several lessons of talking about how we'll know if our trellises will work. 

As we were selecting designing trellises as the focus of the model unit, we considered many common garden issues and needs. We landed on this because peas are a crop that can grow during the school year in many locations and could be grown in an established garden or in just one container on the schoolyard. Our hope is that this design task could happen in many places, including in cities that might have gardening space constraints. In addition, our intention with the model unit is that it could inspire educators to consider what other issues they have on their schoolyard that they and their students might be able to design for, whether there is a garden established or not.

Thanks for watching our video and for your questions, Jackelyn! We only developed the trellis unit, but we generated many ideas for other units that could be developed. A few favorites included: designing bee hotels to attract native bees (appropriate for an established garden, but not as much for a schoolyard with one planter) and designing cold frames to keep crops warm in the winter months (appropriate for middle school thermal energy standards). Some educators decided to teach other units of their own design such as designing pollinator wands.

Students did not discuss the end-of-life plan for their trellises, but that is a wonderful idea and one we may take up in revising the unit before it's released this summer. Thanks for the great suggestion!

Hi Paul, Thanks for watching the video, your question, and your prior STeLLA work! We had hoped to develop several videocases and use a subset of SteLLA strategies in our professional learning. Because of the pandemic, we could only film one lesson in one classroom, so we ended up with just one videocase that helps educators consider how to set up classroom culture for productive group work. It would have been such a value add to the project. Definitely on our radar for future work!