Hi STEM-for-All Showcase Attendees! - My name's Quinn Burke and this is our team's 2022 submission, related to following up on teacher professional development (PD) and making the crucial next step of translating PD into actual classroom implementation for introductory CS.  We look forward to getting your thoughts and particularly welcome any thoughts on how your own work has leveraged teacher PD and what tools/ protocols you have used to ensure such PD effectively enters the classroom. 

The notion of "little bets" is one of those brilliant ideas that is generalizable across a wide variety of contexts and I can see it being used outside of educational innovation as well. I also appreciate your work with rural teachers, who have unique challenges, particularly, I imagine, during the pandemic.  

I'm interested in how a series of "little bets" can build into sustainable change in a classroom.  Do you have case studies of teachers who pursued multiple "little bets" over time?  Are there specific "tipping points" where little bets end up transforming the classroom in bigger ways?  Have you looked at Susan Loucks-Horseley's categorization of how teachers change their practice?

I really like your thoughts about how you can build the "little bets" approach into sustainable change in a classroom. The idea of making a "little bet" is really a simple method for continuous improvement. Students might each make a personal goal and then create a "little bet" to track their outcomes. From there they could identify successes and challenges and build new ideas and outcomes to follow. The same for a teacher. It is a method for identifying what works and building from it by gathering the data you need to determine what actions were successful and those that need improvement. I will look forward to looking at Susan Loucks-Horseley's writing on changing practice. Thanks for the suggestion.

Good morning everyone!

I want to ask about how you have measured the impact of this innovative project, but before I get to that (probably in a later post), I want to dive into this fascinating idea of “Little Bets.” It’s so impressive that you have taken this book and found ways of translating into curricula. Flannery O’Connor once said that she wrote in order to know what she thought. In his book Peter Sims similarly says that that we should “do things to discover what to do.” Could you offer an example or two of projects you did with teachers in order to help them take in Sims’ idea, to get them to do or try things in order to discover what to do? And then I’d also love to hear an example of how the teachers explained or translated this idea to students. It’s clear from the video that students did a wide variety of projects (invented board games, little robot-like machines, etc.), but again what I’m after is how the students began thinking about the value of little bets and how this abstract idea was translated into concrete making. I’m truly excited to hear more (and now I am inspired to read that book)!

Greetings Amy,

Thank you for connecting and for your kind words. Here is an example of how a K-12 CS/STEAM Pathway was built using "Little Bets" the emerging innovation approach: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DlXVuc2-cTVUj9k6IBjMM6f2v1JZwbt9PkfG8JpsEKc/edit?usp=sharing I am happy to provide additional information as needed. Within this NSF grant, we began by bringing a cohort of teachers to a briefing at South Fayette School District where they spent the day visiting K-12 CS classrooms during the day to see CS in action. At the end of the day we provided a workshop on the concepts in the book "Little Bets" and then teachers and administrators worked together to create their first Little Bet to begin in their classroom or district. The participants were given the following prompts: What is your Little Bet?; How does this fit into your larger “big idea”?; Who are the key stakeholders you are designing for?; How might this work as a catalyst for achieving a greater impact? and include an illustration or description of the project and process; List the connections and vertical alignment; How will you measure success year one? Over the next four years?; What are some key milestones? From there the district purchased the book and followed up with professional development. Two of the "Little Bets" that teachers implemented included bringing Habits of Mind into their classroom and beginning a project in Scratch programming. As to your second question regarding how students began thinking about the value of "Little Bets" I believe the universal take-away was to fail fast and not to be afraid of making mistakes. I hope this was helpful to you!

Aileen - thank you so much for these fantastic links. I particularly enjoyed looking through this one (that was linked inside the above doc). Anyone wanting to go deeper should follow these links too - lots of great photos, examples of the Little Bets process, etc. 

I wasn't familiar with the idea of little bets, thanks for the introduction to it and the ways you've had teachers implement them in their classrooms. It's impressive that teachers have developed >90 little bets, especially during the chaos of the pandemic. It seems like a great way to help teachers make incremental steps towards introducing larger CS/CT ideas into their classrooms.

I saw a template here that appears to scaffold teachers through the process of creating their little bets. The prompts on the template look helpful. I have a question about the one that asks teachers to describe how they'll measure success. Do you have any examples of the things teachers talk about in this section? I imagine their success measures are tied to the big ideas they also describe in the template (?). How easy/hard was it for the teachers to think about long-term successes from their initial little bets?

Hi Quinn and Aileen — echoing many others here, I too am excited with the notion of "little bets". A couple of clarifying notes, if possible: what grade range are your teaching partners from? And, like Brian, I'd love to know more about the 90+ activities those teachers came up with. Such an interesting proposition and process here! Thanks!

Hi Sean,

So nice to hear from you. On this grant we focused on grades K-8 but we have used this approach for many years on grades K-12. The beauty of connecting the book Little Bets to K-12 is that it's a great way to provide concrete examples of how the innovation process can occur in education. Through this approach, we are able to introduce the concept of agile thinking, used in the innovation process, versus procedural thinking, which is practiced in traditional education. During the introduction to the pathway teachers learn conceptually how to develop new ideas through an emergent process not necessarily a linear process and become familiar with the value of continuous experimentation and discovery, failing forward to learn fast by tracking and utilizing successes along the way.

Here are some examples from PK-2: 

• Students will create an algorithm of dance steps for another classmate, then the classmate will perform the dance.
• My Little Bet lesson consisted of students coding in sequential order to help a fuzz travel through a maze.
• Students built leprechaun traps around St. Patrick's Day using raw materials, engineering designs, and discussed ways to add sound effects using scratch.

Examples grades 3-5:

• Students will reenact a battle from the American Revolution using spheros. Students will be separated into groups. Some students will represent Britain some students will represent America. Students will then reenact the battle they vote on.
• Students made a treasure map and used Sphero Bolt and Ozo Bots to navigate through it using prepositions. For example, Students had to drive OVER the tree, THROUGH the forest, UNDER the rock, and BY the lake to get to the treasure. They worked in teams and designed their own maps and directions.
• Demonstrate blood flow through heart (& reading comprehension) w/ Hummingbird.

These are just a few ideas teachers came up with after completing a week of the CS/STEAM Summer Institute where they were immersed in ideas and lessons and then invited to create their own unique ideas as a result of their growing confidence and skill set. 

I hope this was helpful to you.