I’m wondering how teachers are supported during the school year when they lead SLED lessons for students? Is this support institutionalized? Also, are participating districts local to Purdue, or are remote districts also included? If so, how?

I noticed that you describe a process where teachers are given experiences with design based tasks in professional development and plan for their implementation with students. I am wondering what challenges, if any, that you notice teachers experiencing as they move into utilizing the planned activities with children in the classroom? Are there any mechanisms that you have found helpful in supporting teachers to overcome the challenges? I also would love to hear more about any supports (i.e., ideas for facilitation, questioning, samples of what children may do in the activities, etc.) given to teachers within the professional development in terms of their instructional planning.

In what ways do you provide a mechanism for teachers to share curriculum ideas with each other once the school term has begun? I can imagine that some teachers can and will discover some very engaging lessons that others would want to emulate. Do you provide detailed lessons that include material lists and suggested assessments in a number of areas?

We have several mechanisms for supporting teacher sharing. We have offered follow-up sessions during the school year when teachers can come together to talk about what is working and where they might be struggling. We publish a newsletter twice each year with updates from the field. We ask teachers to complete reflections on a design activity twice each year, and these reflections are uploaded to our sledhub.org site where, we have learned, other teachers often view them to get ideas. We also have veteran SLED teachers talk with new teachers during the teacher professional development summer institute to describe how they have modified or customized the activities to make them “their own.” Our curricular materials do contain a lot of different resource, including lists of materials, background information about key concepts, suggested activities, etc. Visit our website at https://stemedhub.org/groups/sled/design_resources to access the units that have been developed.

I’ve been following the fine work linking service learning and engineering design at Purdue for many years. It’s nice to see it translated to teacher PD, as we in Buffalo (ISEP, targeted MSP, http://isep.buffalo.edu) do something similar, but not as focused on engineering design. But your works in lower grades than we deal with make this relevant. I have no real questions, love your work and admire it. Will look forward to gaining access to your publications.

Thank you for your comments and interest Joe. We will check out your site. It has been an interesting challenge trying to bring engineering design to the elementary grades. We started in grades 5-6, where things went fairly smoothly. When we added grades 3-4 it became harder, both because the students’ cognitive and psychomotor development is not as good and because the amount of time allocated for science in the school curriculum is minimal. But, that has been balanced by a very enthusiastic group of teachers who have really embraced what we’re trying to do.

This looks like an exciting project that is having impact in the classroom by helping teachers learn how to effectively engage students in engineering design. Great that you support professional development as well as design curriculum. I see from the comments above that you have been thoughtful about supporting teachers after their summer training is complete. Nice job!

Thanks for the comments Stephanie.