Excellent question. For Digging Deeper, we used the teacher and early career scientists’ application materials and spent some time thinking about matches and the best teams to put together. For example, we asked early career scientists why they were interested in participating in this project. Some said they were interested in how high school students were prepared for college and in working with high school teachers to better understand the transition from high school to college. Others said they were interested in increasing access to science for all and an interest in working with underrepresented students or students who might not already have an interest in science. We paired the former with teachers working with AP Biology or other upper-level students, and the latter with those working with freshman science classes. Time zone and other considerations came into play. This match is a key match because these teachers and early career scientist “liaisons” work very closely in person during the workshop and then online during the fall. But every teacher could have up to 20 teams of students working on projects, so other mentors were involved as well.

For the other mentors working with the teachers’ teams, matching is done by the teacher and early career scientist liaison by filtering appropriate available mentors from our mentor gallery and inviting them to the project. Teachers can select based on languages spoken, research interests, by reading the last few posts that mentor made, etc. We’re adding a new feature to the gallery in the near future that will allow teachers or liaisons to “endorse” mentors based on their skills, kind of like LinkedIn.

In the past we did all the mentor matching by hand, but it got to be a big limiting factor to our growth because it was so time consuming. The new gallery will help and also let teachers make better matches customized at the students in each team.

Thanks Catrina. It sounds like your team really took care with the matching process, and I love that the mentor gallery lets teachers search for mentors. I am definitely going to share this with colleagues. Wouldn't it be nice to have a great big directory of scientists who are willing to engage in different outreach opportunities? I can think of lots of projects where that would come in handy. Aside from the reward of helping students, is the program incentivized for the scientists and teachers? I know DOW Agrosciences and other companies have programs to encourage their employees to engage in this type of outreach, and it seems like there's an opportunity here - something similar to teachers being able to "endorse" their mentors, but something that might transfer to other contexts... 

I agree that a big directory of volunteer-minded scientists would be a great idea!

With Digging Deeper, we are providing stipends to the participating teachers and early career scientists through the grant. For PlantingScience, most mentors and teachers do not receive incentives apart from a certificate of participation. We do have a program called our "Master Plant Science Team" which is composed of early career scientists who act as liaisons for the teachers and mentor teams (the ones not part of Digging Deeper). Several of our partner societies sponsor these participants by providing a free membership to their society for the year and 50% off registration to that society's annual meeting. The support we get from our partners in this way has been extremely helpful.

The other thing that we are considering is to look into a badging system like Mozilla's Open Badges as a way of recognizing our teachers and mentors in a transferable way.

We recognized that possibility and have a few strategies in place to combat that. First, we include a question in our application for early-career scientists that asks them:

In 1-2 succinct paragraphs, describe the ways you anticipate contributing to and benefiting from a relationship with high school biology teachers. (max. 200 words)

We look at this response carefully and make sure that there is a good fit with the program.  Just answering the question starts scientist participants thinking from the beginning about the relationship with teachers as a two-way partnership. It’s been a while since we recruited teachers, but I believe we included a similar question for the participating teachers.

During the workshop, we have a dinner discussion around “a day in the life” where we encourage scientists and teachers to share what their days are like. We find that this helps a lot with misunderstandings that can sometimes come up during the mentoring. For example, so that teachers learn that a mentor may have travel dates that are set in stone, and a mentor might learn that a teacher’s timeline must be somewhat flexible to account for snow days, assemblies, etc. It’s also super helpful for teachers to describe what it’s like to teach science in a 45 minute class time or to know that some teachers only have one windowsill available for growing plants in their classroom, as that gives the mentors some perspective.

What also helps with our program is that there are different key roles for the teacher and scientist as they co-mentor student projects. The teacher is the link with the classroom and puts the projects in perspective for the mentors. The mentors need to know what’s being taught in the classroom, schedule changes, discussions the students are having in class, etc. Mentors sometimes feel like they are mentoring in a black box if they have to rely solely on the students’ posts to understand the project and are missing key context from the teacher.

During our summer workshop, scientists appreciated the pedagogy instruction and some of the tools (questioning strategies, supports for graph interpretation) we included. Some commented that they will use these tools in their college classrooms. When the teachers are coming up with project ideas in small teams during the workshop, we separate the scientists from the teachers so scientists can only provide feedback to their teachers online (as the students will in the fall). This helps everyone experience what distance mentoring looks and feels like as preparation to help the students effectively in the fall.

Oh, these are excellent strategies! So important to have that mutual respect for one another's knowledge, and I like the way you cultivate that. Thanks for answering, Catrina.

Agreed! The "day in the life" dinner discussion is a really great idea.

Thank you for your question. We also appreciate the opportunity to build on and expand a successful program. Considering the recruitment or participation of teachers for the week-long summer workshops, we can identify both successes and challenges. We were fortunate to get teachers representing diverse schools, including public, private, urban, rural, suburban, and different free/reduced lunch status. The participating teachers seemed to really enjoy the opportunity to meet and get to work with teachers from all over the country who each could share their own experiences. We can identify some challenges for recruitment for, or participation in, the program. As you might expect for a one-week, in-person workshop, scheduling can be an issue because of other commitments that teachers have during the summer. The design of the research study in this project called for a two-year commitment from the participating teachers. Some teachers may not have applied because of this commitment. Also, the research design called for participants to be randomly assigned to one of the two cohorts. Some teachers wanted the ability to change their assigned group, which would have compromised the research.  

The face-to-face interactions at the summer workshops were great and the teachers seemed to truly value the time to work with other teachers and the scientist mentors directly. However, we recognize that this type of workshop is not always possible because of expense and scheduling. We are considering other ways to make some of the benefits from the workshop more easily available to other teachers. Some ideas include putting more of the instruction online, possibly having shorter workshops at partner scientific society meetings, or perhaps smaller regional teams meeting in person but collaborating with a bigger group online.