Hi Julie-
The teacher fellows who create the curriculum have a large commitment to the project. They spent 3 weeks with us in PD while they developed their curriculum first draft, then they spent 2.5 days teaching in a pilot with summer camp kids to try out the curriculum. After this, they modified their curriculum based on what they learned in the pilot. During the school year, they had monthly meetings with their coach and two implementation times in the classroom (their curriculum and one other STEM integration unit). The coaches were highly involved with each of these.

We are in the middle of our 4th year of funding. We are now working on sustainability in the school districts and scaling the curricula.

For sustainability, we have started a teacher leadership group that is tailored to each of the school districts’ needs. Here former teacher fellows or other teachers who have been involved in the project take on peer coaching roles. We have a one-week PD with them in the summer and then they have the opportunity to coach teachers in their schools throughout the year (with support from us, of course).

For scalability, we are taking the best of the best curricular units that have been developed and taking them through one more year of design (for a design research study). Field test teachers who are not authors of the curriculum will be putting the curriculum into their classrooms. They will go through a 1-week PD and then implementation. They will help us make final changes to the curricula before we work on publishing.

Thank you for your interest!
Best,
Tamara

Wonderful! It seems so /right/ for the development to come centrally from teachers, who are the ones who really understand teaching and kids, but the task itself—designing and crafting materials for use by others—is not the same skill set that makes a wonderful teacher. I’m glad you’re getting both, and would love to see the results.

Hi Debi!

Before the pilot the EngrTEAMS Fellows (teacher curriculum designers) have developed a first draft of their unit. During the pilot with summer camp students, the have the opportunity to spend 5 hours on some aspect of the curriculum they want to test with students. Then they take that information and use it to improve their curriculum to the next draft (due shortly after the pilot). Here is a lesson we learned… In the first year, our Fellows used this time to implement parts of the curriculum they were more sure about (we believe they did this because they didn’t want to fail in front of us). So in the subsequent years, we made sure to emphasize the need for using this time as the test for parts they wanted more information about. We also emphasized that we were not judging but rather in this thing with them. By this new emphasis and by helping them feel more comfortable, the pilot has become something very important in the curriculum design process.
Best,
Tamara

Thank you Ron… We believe that both the things we are learning about coaching and the things we are learning about how to help teachers develop curriculum will be useful beyond this project!

Hi Gretal-
These are good questions. Most of our coaching support was face-to-face when it could be. However, some of our teams were at different schools or even from different school districts, so they often had electronic meetings (Skype or Google Hangouts, etc.). This facilitated having Fellow teams that were not co-located. There were two types of coaching conversations. One set of conversations were related to supporting the implementation for the curriculum developed through the EngrTEAMS project. These were high engagement and high intensity support structures that generally centered on the actual writing or implementation of the curricular unit. These meetings were directly related to making sure the curricula were implemented in the best way possible for the Fellows. The second was the support for STEM integration in general. Here, these support structures were spread out across the academic year and centered on areas the Fellows identified as things they wanted to work on related to STEM integration. These sustained meetings were more about the Fellows wants and needs for how to change their own practice.

We are always excited to learn more about how to help underrepresented populations engage with engineering. We will make sure to look at your project. At this point, we provided PD on this issue and our frameworks that guide their work include some effective practices we gathered from literature. Many of the Fellows work in highly diverse schools, so there has been an opportunity to test the effectiveness of the curriculum in these settings. We have some research on the motivation and interest of the students involved in our project. In this research, it was consistent that these curricula improved the motivation and interest for all demographics in the study. Our four school partners represent contiguous school districts that go from inner urban and branch out toward suburban. Our goal for the curricula is to understand how it works in all settings. We’ll make sure to look at your project.
Best,
Tamara

Tamara, I would like to learn a little more about the teams that met electronically, as opposed to face to face. Were those teams as cohesive and productive as the teams that met face to face? I am curious because we are exploring online coaching as a spin off to our grant project. However, we are concerned that the lack of face to face interaction between coaches and their mentees may negatively impact the ability for the two to bond and work well together.

Hi Julie-
I put this question to Gillian Roehrig – our coPI at the University of Minnesota that leads the coaching aspect of this project. She said the following, “In EngrTEAMS, online coaching was very successful but the teams had built rapport with each other and their coach first in a face-to-face setting.” I hope this is helpful.
Best,
Tamara

Thank you, Tamara. It makes sense that online coaching would have a greater chance of success if the coach and the team members met face to face initially.

Hi Courtney-
Our fellows are recruited from the school district partners involved in our MSP project. The school leaders who sit on the partnership team for the entire grant each can recruit in their district in any way they see fit. One thing that we focused on was to make sure the teacher fellows were selected because the school leaders recognized them as people who would thrive in this type of atmosphere. We made sure the fellows understood that they were chosen for this work (more than just self-selected). We also make sure the fellows understand that they are our partners in this work (we are not doing something to them, but rather we are creating things together). This has really helped all aspects of the project.
In terms of the teams, they are chosen once the teachers come to the summer institute. They self form teams based on interest in working on the same curricular idea and grade level. Some fellows come knowing they want to work with particular people, while others are happy to form teams once they come. This means we have a nice variety of teams that are school-based teams, district-based teams, and inter-district teams – all of which have been successful overall.
Best,
Tamara

Hi Miriam-
For the first three years of the grant, we were having teachers develop the curriculum for their classrooms. During this time, the coaches were graduate students. The graduate students took a graduate level coaching course each year – so the training is extensive here.
We are now moving into the next phase of the project, which addresses scalability and sustainability. For the scalability, we are taking a subset of the curricula and taking them through another set of the design-research cycle with new teachers who were not the fellows who designed them (we call these teachers “field test teachers”). The graduate students are now moving to support the design-research aspects of the curriculum development – so no longer in a coaching role.
For the sustainability, we are working with the district partners to develop plans to continue the coaching aspects of the grant once the money runs out. We are doing this through a “teacher leadership institute”. We ran a pilot last year So generally the teachers that are participating in this aspect of the grant are former fellows or were somehow already involved in the grant in some other way. These teacher leaders go through a different institute for coaching and then get to practice through one of two ways. Some of the teacher leaders will coach the field test teachers this summer while they implement the curricula, and others will have roles for STEM integration coaching in their school districts as decided by their administration.
Best,
Tamara

This seems like a really great model for sustainability. I’m curious about coaching in the districts where you are working. It seems like in many of the districts with which we have worked, coaching has been cut due to budget priorities.. Does it seem likely that the districts with which you are working will continue to put a value on coaching? In particular, I’m wondering if you think this project has been influential in their decision to continue to support coaches.

This is a great question. Each district has been designing their own version of how the coaching will work. Each district has PLCs. In some, I believe they will be the PLC leaders. But in all cases, I believe they are also still classroom teachers. A few will get some release time, but I don’t think this is the overall plan. We are just starting the teacher leadership (other than the small pilot we did last year) this summer, so stay tuned as we learn more.