You're Doing What?: Scientists Volunteering in Classrooms
The Academy’s Education Department has a simple mission: identify high-impact, scalable pathways for scientists to directly increase the number of children who are STEM literate. For the STEM Mentoring Program (SMP),that means recruiting the greatest salesmen – young scientists who are motivated to teach and serve as role models– and training and supporting them to teach in educationally underserved neighborhoods.
The children get to experience science as it really is–intriguing, hands-on, filled with questions–at a critical time in their identity development and school choices. The mentors also receive valuable skills–teaching, mentoring, and an understanding of student needs –which we hope will cement their sense of professional responsibility to the next generation of citizens.
About You
About You
First Name
Meghan
Last Name
Groome
About Your Organization
Organization Name
New York Academy of Sciences
Organization Website
Organization Phone
212-298-8600
Organization Address
250 Greenwich Street 40th Floor
Organization Country
United States, NY, New York County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, NY, New York County
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
More than 5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
You're Doing What?: Scientists Volunteering in Classrooms
What change do you want to bring to the world?
The Academy’s Education Department has a simple mission: identify high-impact, scalable pathways for scientists to directly increase the number of children who are STEM literate. For the STEM Mentoring Program (SMP),that means recruiting the greatest salesmen – young scientists who are motivated to teach and serve as role models– and training and supporting them to teach in educationally underserved neighborhoods.
The children get to experience science as it really is–intriguing, hands-on, filled with questions–at a critical time in their identity development and school choices. The mentors also receive valuable skills–teaching, mentoring, and an understanding of student needs –which we hope will cement their sense of professional responsibility to the next generation of citizens.
What are the primary activities of your project?
Our program brings young scientists to teach engaging, hands-on curricula to young people who need science in their lives. While the program is flexible and can be adapted for different settings, it must adhere to a fundamental philosophy of inspiring kids with direct, inquiry-based science instruction, and follow a core set of activities. Through this program, we aim to adapt our model to place scientist-mentors in Extended Learning Day (ELD) programs in the Newark, NJ public schools.
Our fundamental activities are the recruitment, training, placement, and support of the mentors. We work closely with senior faculty and administrators at universities ensure that the mentors are supported, and evaluate and modify their experiences. These relationships also lead to further involvement by these institutions, such as providing access to supplies and hosting lab visits.
We screen the volunteers through an application and interview process. Once chosen, they participate in training to learn how to teach specific curricula and the basics of youth development. We partner with top organizations, such as NYU and FIRST, to create curricula that are fun, engaging, easy to teach, and set to standards.
Next, mentors, typically two with similar backgrounds, are placed in a site and assigned to a coteacher. Mentors, experts in science, and their coteachers, experts in teaching, attend the trainings together to map out their lessons and expectations for the classroom. The coteaching and partner model allows both parties to learn how to teach science in a supportive, collaborative, and safe manner.
Finally, we provide on-demand technical assistance to help solve pedagogical, behavioral, resource, and content-related problems that the mentors may face throughout the program. In addition, mentors bond around their curriculum areas and their fields of research, and interact using social media and in person “check in” sessions hosted by the Academy.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
The basic premise of our program–young scientists teaching in classrooms– isn’t a new idea. One can find that model in programs raging from NSF’s GK12 program, to university programs like the UTeach model, and local programs like those of our partners, such as FIRST. Similar programs are documented to have positive impacts on students, schools, scientists, and educators. Our program is innovative because it connects a relatively abundant resource–young scientists–directly to an area that is severely under- resourced–urban science classrooms–through a simple and scalable partnership mechanism with a broad stakeholder base and high quality control.
The program has managed broad reach in its first year by taking advantage of what the Academy does best–building networks among communities with complementary goals and leveraging the power of those networks towards clear, explicit outcomes. In our pilot program in New York City, fewer than four employees at two organizations orchestrated over 2,400 volunteer hours at 84 sites, serving more than 2,100 students in less than one year. In our Newark site, the program will simply connect the existing supply of Newark-based young scientists to the demand for quality science education at Newark schools.
Another innovation is the direct application of the program to classrooms that need the intervention most. Our education system struggles to bridge a dramatic achievement gap that is clearly defined by socioeconomic status. We contribute to this effort simply by partnering with organizations who serve our target demographics.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
In Year 1 of this program, we partnered with 84 Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) supported by NYC’s Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) to run afterschool programs for 2nd through 9th graders. We now seek funding for a pilot program that would adapt our existing program to work in an ELD format in three elementary schools in Newark, NJ. While the experience for the mentors–from the recruitment through the placement–will be very similar, the choice to work in an ELD program, in schools, is a significant test of the program design. The ELD is an extension of the school day designed to deliver rigorous instruction that will positively improve the students’ academic performance. As part of their school turn around model, Citizen Schools (CS) has had success treating ELDs as afterschool models while delivering academic rigor. For the STEM mentoring program, this means that we will test whether hands-on, engagement-driven curriculum modules delivered by scientists can satisfy CS’s Academic rigor and accountability standards.
This effort engages two communities. The children, who predominantly come from economically disadvantaged communities, not only receive exposure to new and engaging curricula, but also learn from young and energetic scientists, who, while working to inspire a new generation of scientific innovators, also serve as positive role models. Through this experience, the students gain confidence in their science and math abilities, encouraging higher achievement in classroom and testing outcomes. Meanwhile, the mentors have the invaluable opportunity to work outside university walls over the course of a semester and impart their knowledge to the children who need it most. Our familiarity with our mentors and our strong CBO partnerships means that our program is designed to work in under resourced classrooms but that almost any kid can have an enriching and engaging experience.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
The New York Academy of Sciences has a long history of promoting education in New York City and beyond. Through this program, we strive to bring scientific capacity to bear on the needs of schools, specifically engaging students who are educationally underserved.
The program was conceived with input by two otherwise disconnected groups: Academic scientists and NYC’s DYCD. The Academy’s scientific membership needed pathways to address the crisis in education and the City needed help building capacity to deliver STEM education through its vast network of afterschool programs. By bringing together stakeholders on both sides, the Academy designed the program around the principles found in the Opportunity Equation and tailored to work to NYC.
As the inaugural director of the education department, I was brought on board in July 2010 with the responsibility to enact the design. I’ve had a varied career–from classroom teaching to academic to policy work–but I have always been driven to find ways to systematically drive resources to those underserved in STEM education. My experiences teaching in Paterson, NJ were formative in my understanding that some groups are denied access to education due to historical and systematic inequities. For me, this program is inspiring because it provides scientists with a way to directly address those inequities by providing a service that any kid would covet but usually only select kids can access.
While I immediately see the impact on the kids, the impact on the mentors is just as profound in shaping their identity as scientists.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
We measure success for the mentors, the students, and the sites that we work with. In our first year, we trained and placed 120 mentors who were graduate students or postdocs in STEM: 75% of those mentors completed the program and 30% taught more than one semester. This pilot year provided proof of concept for interest and value to the scientific community.
While we have not yet completed an external evaluation, anecdotal evidence suggests that the mentors felt well prepared to teach their curricula, emerged with more confidence in their ability to teach, and would recommend the program to a colleague.
Our faculty partners have also signaled their satisfaction with the program by continuing to send young scientists, recommending our program to other faculty members, and taking time to interview their students and provide us with constructive feedback. The evidence gathered to date, specifically the recommendations by the mentors and their faculty, demonstrates that a key participant values the program.
To evaluate student impact, we have surveyed site staff and supervisors and learned anecdotally that the children enjoy and value the program, are engaged in the hands on lessons, and have come to view science as an expectation part of their day. We have designed a study that would, if funded, measure content knowledge learning gains specific to the curriculum, student attitudes, and self-efficacy, as well as assess identity formation and its relationship to the program.
Like the mentors and faculty, the program staff recommends our program to their colleagues. In terms of future evaluation, we would like to track site staff content knowledge, self-efficacy towards facilitating science, and engagement with other STEM programs. We also would like to track parental engagement and work to establish family science nights in the future.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
1,001- 10,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
1,001-10,000
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
We hope that our program will evolve in three directions. The first will expand our reach to more sites and mentors. Our model is designed to maintain quality as it scales so we feel comfortable with that we can recruit more mentors and schools.
The second direction is to refine our curriculum modules to suit the needs and wants of the children and the talents of the mentors. We know we can maintain our commitment of hands on, engaging STEM curricula, but want to make sure the kids are learning topics they are interested in and that the programs cover topics and processes that are important elements of scientific literacy.
Finally, we would like to pilot the programs in more high needs districts in the New York area and find models that work more closely with more schools.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
In Year 1, we have faced a set of challenges that we feel we will continue to encounter as we scale the project. The first is the need to establish individual relationships with faculty and administrators. This requires briefing them on the project, convincing them of its value, and assuring them that the program provides a balance of outreach and research time for their students. This challenge is aided by faculty-to-faculty recommendations and successful outcomes but still requires high level relationship building and maintenance.
The second challenge that we will continue to face is pressure to make the curricula less inquiry-driven and more teacher-focused or directly instructional. While many students benefit from this type of instruction, inquiry lessons are fundamental to our program, help the mentors learn how to teach, and provide engagement, content knowledge, and a role model for the children. This challenge requires us to choose our partners carefully, set out expectations, and make our co-teaching partners more comfortable with this style of teaching.
The third challenge is to provide adequate supports for the mentors as they enter the classroom. While the Academy staff is highly qualified to work with novice teachers, we continue to improve our support structures by creating a cohort structure, site visits partnering mentors who are at the same site, building online support structures, and holding face-to-face “check in” sessions. We have started to take advantage of our “alumni” network of program completers by having them conduct their own supportive site visits, identifying experts in a specific area (finding supplies, working with ELL students) and we feel a second layer of peer to peer mentors would be an excellent additional support.
Tell us about your partnerships
Our current model is a public/private partnership that links the resources of major scientific research institutions to a network of publicly funded education programs with the Academy serving as the intersection point by which the mentors are partnered with the programs in which they teach.
Area Universities partner with us through our Science Alliance (SA) program and promote the mentoring opportunity to their graduate students and postdocs who then apply through a process administered by Academy staff.
We partner with curriculum providers (NYU, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cornell University, FIRST) to design the curricula for specific settings and train the mentors to teach the units. They also provide specific support to help the teachers enact the curriculum.
In NYC, our lead partner, DYCD, runs a competitive application process to receive the program that is open to all of the afterschool programs that it funds. Those programs are Community-Based Organizations that provide a suite of supports to neighborhoods and families. They range from the Harlem Children’s Zone to the YMCA to smaller, community groups like Woodside on the Move or Vision Urbana Senior Center. We work with DYCD to select programs and make matches between our selected applicants and their selected programs. DYCD also funds a youth development training session, conducted by PASE, and background check.
In the project proposed here, the process by which we recruit the mentors stays the same, we recruit from Rutgers, Stevens Institute, UMDNJ, and Seton Hall. Our Newark partner in Citizen Schools, a national non-profit that runs extended learning day programs at three Newark schools. They will conduct the youth development training and background checks and we will conduct a similar process that matches mentors with teachers at in their programs.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$250,001‐500,000
Explain your selections
The program is funded through a mix of private foundations, individuals, and public dollars. In 2010, we received a challenge grant from Infosys Foundation USA which allowed us to secure funding from a diverse array of funders including Goldman Sachs Gives, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and a set of individual donors. This seed funding allowed the Academy to hire Dr. Groome and recruit its first class of mentors and programs in the summer of 2010. The NYC Department of Education and Department of Youth and Community Development provide approximately $15,000 a year in in-kind support and while the mentors volunteer at no cost to the site, the site directors must allocate staff time and classroom space.
Once the pilot was underway, additional funders came on board including the New York Community Trust, The William Randolph Hearst Foundations, the Achelis and Bodman Foundations, the Fordham Street Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Laura B. Vogler Foundation. At the end of Year 1, we received a significant contract through the Consortium of Summer Matters Funders to provide the program to 24 summer programs for middle grades. This second round of funding allowed us to hire a full time education coordinator.
We have submitted large federal grants through the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health to sustainably support this program. We have also partnered with other organizations to seek large and small scale funding from the federal government.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
We’ve identified a number of areas where we can make significant improvements to the program with increased investments. These include including more site staff in all of our trainings to enhance the capacity of the community based organizations we work with, increasing the number of science activities that incorporate parents, providing training for all mentors in math and pedagogy, providing sites with a supply budget and field trips, and providing mentors with travel stipends. We also plan to expand the program regionally to reach students in New Jersey, upstate New York, and beyond.
While we continue to seek support from private corporations and foundations, we are currently seeking large scale public funding through the NSF and NIH to provide sustainable support for the program and allow it to grow. We are also seeking funding to support a high quality external evaluation, which is a key factor in understanding the value of the program beyond internal evaluations. Given the support from the programs at the faculty level of our university partners we are working closely with them to apply for pieces of research grants (through Broader Impact requirements for federal grants) that will provide a stream of small scale funding.
Partnerships and Accountability
Please tell us more about how your partnership was formed and how it functions. What specific role does each partner play? What unique resources does each partner bring to the initiative?
The origins of the pilot NYC program have been explained in the Sustainability section so we wanted to take this opportunity to specifically discuss the Newark expansion. In Year 1, we had mentors from the Newark-based universities but we didn’t have a CBO partner where we could place them.
Through the Academy’s networks, we were able to connect with Citizen Schools (CS) and found that our mission and methods connect in a way that could mutually leverage our core competencies, take advantage of existing infrastructure, and serve our target demographics. We also knew that we could use our existing model but modify it slightly to work in a school-based setting. CS, a national non-profit organization that runs extended day programs in the Newark area, provides access to a highly effective program in which volunteers create curriculum and teach subjects that they are passionate about. The Academy enhances the CS program in three specific ways: a systematic path for graduate students and postdocs to enter CS programs where none existed before, curriculum training and support that is set to the scope and sequence, and additional layers of support that include a cohort structure.
The Academy will be responsible for building relationships with Newark universities, recruiting mentors, providing curriculum training for mentors and co-teachers, and providing support through the school year. CS will be responsible for maintaining their regular programming, holding the youth development training, and doing background checks for the mentors. Both partners maintain separate but coordinated support structures for the mentors that include site visits, networking activities, and on-demand technical assistance.
How are you building in accountability for students' successful STEM learning outcomes? Please provide a summary and examples.
The Academy evaluates impact on the mentors, students, and sites that include satisfaction and value of the program, self-efficacy, completion and requests to continue with the program, and recommendations to colleagues. Supporting faculty members conduct regular interviews with their students to assess the value of the program and provide us with critical feedback to compare with our own findings. We have also created a feedback loop that allows us to survey the mentors and the sites to improve the curricula with the curriculum providers. We collected surveys from the first two cohorts about the implementation of the curricula and worked closely with the curriculum providers to better align the training with the needs of the mentors and their students. We would like to complete an external evaluation to measure increases in content knowledge and self-efficacy of the students and increases in confidence and pedagogical skills for the mentors. We would also like to monitor the long-term outcomes of the mentors and the sites to see if their experiences in the program lead to career or programmatic changes.
Citizen Schools maintains a Research and Evaluation team that monitors key student outcomes and indicators, enabling them to track progress toward our ambitious goals and to identify areas of strength and areas in need of improvement. At ELD schools they’ve recorded high attendance rates, student success in maintaining high grades and improving poor grades, and improved 21st century skills. While not yet available for every school, current data suggests strong gains on student engagement and achievement measures that are critical to our students, as well as to our school and district partners.
Needs
Investment, Research/Information, Mentorship.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add needs that may not be listed.
Our main needs right now are to solicit sustainable support for the program, complete an external evaluation, better understand issues of scale, and build our network of education colleagues. An external evaluation will provide us with invaluable feedback on the impact of our program and adapt the program to be better suited for sustainability and scale. Guidance around methods and mechanisms for scale will also help us make a strategic plan for growth while maintaining a high quality and efficient program. Finally, we have an amazing network of professions in the STEM fields but are just beginning our work in education, especially at the CBO level. Our New York CBO network has proven invaluable to us from both an education and science perspective.
Offers
Research/Information, Collaboration/Networking, Innovation/Ideas, Mentorship.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add offers that may not be listed.
The Academy has a member base of over 25,000 scientists, engineering, mathematicians, and innovators from all over the world with a concentration in New York. Through our education work, we have found them to be enthusiastic towards outreach and highly capable of accessing resources. Our greatest strength is our ability to tap our network and collaborate with a wide-base of stakeholders and if there are ways for us to help other organizations we’d be very happy to do so. We also have diverse distribution channels including mailing lists, podcasts, a magazine and journal, and social media channels and run over 100 education and scientific events a year. This combination allows us to reach a large number of people and tap into their expertise.
