GE/MPS STEM Partnership
The mission of GE/MPS STEM Partnership promotes working through volunteerism to improve the access, equity, and quality of STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Education within the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system. At its heart, this partnership seeks to improve the knowledge and skills of students in the core academic areas of math and science, and the integration of those into exciting cross-discipline projects. Through project based learning, students will improve their skills around critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
Through the partnership between GE Volunteers and MPS, STEM career paths are brought to under-represented populations, by interactions, activities and support that influence K-12th grade education.
About You
About You
First Name
Gina
Last Name
Dundun
About Your Organization
Organization Name
GE Healthcare
Organization Website
Organization Phone
Organization Address
Organization Country
United States, WI
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, WI
Is your organization a
For‐profit
How long has your organization been operating?
More than 5 years
The information you provide here will be used to fill in any parts of your profile that have been left blank, such as interests, organization information, and website. No contact information will be made public. Please uncheck here if you do not want this to happen..
Innovation
Entry Form title
GE/MPS STEM Partnership
What change do you want to bring to the world?
The mission of GE/MPS STEM Partnership promotes working through volunteerism to improve the access, equity, and quality of STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Education within the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system. At its heart, this partnership seeks to improve the knowledge and skills of students in the core academic areas of math and science, and the integration of those into exciting cross-discipline projects. Through project based learning, students will improve their skills around critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
Through the partnership between GE Volunteers and MPS, STEM career paths are brought to under-represented populations, by interactions, activities and support that influence K-12th grade education.
What are the primary activities of your project?
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is central to the future of our city’s youth and employers alike. The GE/MPS STEM Partnership was formed to promote educational programs and events in MPS as a positive attribute in our community. GE Volunteers partner with schools inside MPS, which are using the national pre-engineering project-based curriculum, Project Lead the Way (PLTW).
PLTW truly integrates STEM across the math and science disciplines and actively adds engineering and technology – which few classroom based programs do and do well. GE Volunteers enter the PLTW classroom in support of this curriculum. Here, volunteers provide a tie between the curriculum, their jobs, and their experiences through providing extra hands and adult contact during the normal class.
The GE/MPS STEM Partnership provides opportunities for Milwaukee's business community to interact with MPS students on meaningful STEM projects and activities. The team has grown to include dozens of active and retired GE employees and five MPS schools, as well as a few district wide initiatives. During the 2010-2011 school year the partnership reached 19 classes and over 700 students. The employee volunteers logged over 1700 hours in GE/MPS STEM related activities. This number represents a 40% growth over the 1200 hours served the previous year.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
Milwaukee is the fourth poorest city in the United States of America. 82% of Milwaukee Public Schools students have family incomes low enough to qualify for “free and reduced” government lunch programs. Students and their families assume a young person has to leave Milwaukee to succeed. Through the K-12 educational partnership and volunteerism, GE Volunteers show successful people and successful companies, right here in the Milwaukee community. The volunteers showcase options and paths for the future. They open students’ minds to new information and STEM opportunities, while preparing them with the basic knowledge. GE Volunteers can link the daily curriculum with real-world of work examples, making learning come alive. The volunteers can be in a classroom one day, see the curriculum presented and share the story of how it applies to the work done at GE yesterday. Or they can give a presentation of “here is what I am working on, using the same software you are using here.”
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.
This project engages two populations. One is the students and staff of the Milwaukee Public Schools and the other is the employees at GE, the volunteers looking to make a difference in the city where they live and work.
Milwaukee is the fourth poorest city in the United States of America. Milwaukee Public Schools is a public urban school district, with nearly 82,000 students. The district demographics show a 90% minority population, 82% of students living in families with income levels that qualify them for “free and reduced” lunch. GE purposefully choose schools that are NOT high performing schools; including schools with English Language Learners, schools in the inner-city, and schools where greater than 20% of the student body have special needs.
These are the students and families that need support.
GE employees make this project possible. We are 100% volunteers. We all have careers and daily jobs to support GE. There are several GE facilities throughout the Milwaukee area and we have volunteers from them all. We are people with STEM careers – engineers, technicians, finance, marketing, etc.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
As a woman engineer, I know some of the struggles to obtain a STEM career. I also realize the opportunities my career has afforded me to take care of myself and to take care of my family. As a child, my parents opened up their house as a shelter home for battered women and their children. I saw how desperate one’s life can become when you have no skills, no options. I knew I never wanted that for myself. I want to be able to stand on my own two feet and not have to rely on others for basic needs. I was afforded a stable home, a stable family, and a solid K-12 education, and I STILL had to work hard to get through the engineering course work - things that didn’t make sense to me, things that I had no point of reference to help the process. When I first walked into a Project Lead The Way classroom and saw 11 year old girls using Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) software, I just about cried. How fantastic to be able to understand that at 11 versus waiting until you are 20 and in an engineering class you paid $2,000 for! It was unbelievably fabulous. That was the moment that hooked me.
The rest fell into place and now seems like perfectly fitting puzzle pieces. My husband is a teacher in the Milwaukee Public Schools. Our children attended school there. I know the struggles of the families and staffs working with this population. We live in this city and support this city. To be able to work to pull in GE and GE resources into this struggling school district, is work that is close to my heart as I feel, hear, and see the need every day.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
We measure success by the number of volunteer hours, number of students and classrooms reached, and end-of-the-year surveys to both the students and GE Volunteers.
During the 2010-2011 school year the GE/MPS STEM Partnership reached 19 classes and over 700 students. The employee volunteers logged over 1700 hours in GE/MPS STEM related activities. This number represents a 40% growth over the 1200 hours served the previous year.
The student surveys indicate that the students enjoy the GE Volunteers coming into their classroom. They enjoy the interaction and attention. They state they enjoy science more and know more “technical people” than before. In addition they leave comments such as “I love Mr. Bob” and “Science is fun!” on these surveys.
The volunteer surveys solicit feedback on the whole volunteer experience, from the ways the volunteer teams are organized and communicated with, to the classroom experience. This tool provides valuable input into the next year’s design. The program coordinators know what things to keep doing, as well as things that need to improve. The final question on the survey is “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend GE/MPS STEM Partnership to a friend?” This question is the Net Promoter Score. This metric is used at GE as a measurement of customer loyalty and growth potential. In the case of volunteerism, the volunteers are the customers. GE wants them to enjoy the experience, to feel good about the experience, and to return again and again - hopefully, bringing colleagues. The Net Promoter Score is a strong indicator of loyalty because when someone recommends you, they are putting their reputation on the line. They’ll take that risk only if they are loyal and believe in it. The Net Promoter Score this year is an 8.7. It's a number we are proud of.
Additionally, the GE/MPS STEM Partnership has been an anchoring partnership among Milwaukee area businesses, helping to increase the number and quality of partnerships working in STEM education with MPS. Today, a broad group of business and post-secondary partners, the MPS STEM Partners, exists and works on both a district and school level to support and nurture STEM educational opportunities in the schools – from assisting in Project Lead The Way labs to providing field trips, job shadowing experiences and internships, as well as attending career fairs and helping with project funding.
The PLTW program in MPS has continued to grow and see improved results in student engagement – through attendance rates and student interest – and achievement – through increased test scores and ACT test taking rates and scores. The support from the GE/MPS STEM Partnership has been central to the growth of the program, including actually funding one new school entering PLTW. The work of the volunteers is a critical part of the engagement of the students.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
101-1,000
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?
The GE/MPS STEM Partnership will expand into a new school each year, as the schools and volunteer base continues to grow. They continues to search the needs in the schools and the district and finds ways to support. For example, last year the team put together a new program called “GE Engineer For A Day” to support the teacher’s request to help students learn more about the different engineering disciplines. The students rotated around different stations with GE engineers who had brought in objects and photos to describe their jobs. This pilot was successful and is expected to move into other partner schools with a repeatable annual schedule be created. The partnership will continue to support or build these creative and interactive programs to support MPS.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
The mission of GE/MPS STEM Partnership promotes working through volunteerism to improve the access, equity, and quality of STEM Education within the Milwaukee Public School system. The partnership does this work utilizing both internal and external best practices that provide measurable, sustainable outcomes such as:
•Being highly Focused: Issues & Locations
•Ensuring our programs are Sustainable & Scalable
•Creating opportunities for utilizing employee’s assets for Leadership & Capacity Building
•Building a Multi-generation Plan
•Define the individual school / class room need
•Develop the solution with the school, teacher, students & volunteers
•Create a ‘trial’ run, make sure to work out all the ‘kinks’ before full implementation
Through this work, the programs become effective for the schools and easy for the volunteers. Most of the volunteer partnership work is during the school day, during normal business working hours. The largest hindrance today is time management and work/life balance. The partnership runs 100% on GE volunteers, who all have day jobs they need to perform at and perform well. The partnership leadership teams works to attract volunteers through recruitment and employee recognition. The partnership leadership team also works with GE managers to create a work environment that allows the volunteers to leave work. When working with the managers, the leadership team outlines the skills that employees are developing through volunteerism – public speaking, influencing skills, organization, etc. These employees are also growing a sense of community building up the next generation workforce. GE is here in Milwaukee for the long haul, working to make GE successful means working to make Milwaukee successful.
Tell us about your partnerships
To further the goal of sustainability and replicability, the GE/MPS STEM Partnership project manager, began meeting with her peers from several other key Milwaukee area businesses to share experiences, discuss strategies, and mentor those companies to follow the lead of the GE/MPS STEM Partnership.
The leadership team is involved in several district-wide initiatives. These include being judges at the district’s science fair and representing the company at career and technology fairs. GE Volunteers also serve as business representatives and STEM advocates on several committees that are working towards improving STEM inside MPS. These include the Milwaukee Science Coalition, MPS STEM Partners, and the MPS Comprehensive Math and Science Plan - Community Outreach Committee. The focus of the GE/MPS STEM Partnership is always on the students. The volunteers take an active role in these other committees to drive systemic change for the schools and families, in order to ultimately affect the children.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$1,000‐$10,000
Explain your selections
Our program is run 100% by individual GE Volunteers and their interaction with the school district staff/teachers. On GE side, there are project leaders and school leaders, all GE volunteers, who organize and plan events. There is a GE Volunteer council that oversees all the programs, again run by GE Volunteers. The volunteers use a software system that logs activities and volunteer hours. In Milwaukee, the team is focused on five partner schools in order to create a locally sustainable program. With many people involved and various activities at the school, the volunteers are creating multiple links and contact points, all of which are sustainable and replicable. GE Volunteers annually funds the GE/MPS STEM Partnership based on volunteer hours and requires the funds to be used only for volunteer involved activities (not equipment, staff, etc).
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
With the continued involvement of the volunteer teams from GE, this partnership is firmly rooted and will continue to grow. For fall of 2011, the GE Volunteers are working with several new principals at the existing schools and adding one new school to the partnership. This new middle school is closely allied with a high school in its neighborhood, which also has PLTW. The GE Volunteers plan to approach that high school in the coming year. It is not the intention of the GE/MPS STEM Partnership to be in every MPS school. Instead, this partnership reaches broadly within its own capacity and acts as a role model for other local businesses.
Additionally, since working with schools across the city in grades 6-12, the GE Volunteers have identified the need to reach down into younger grades with STEM learning and exposure to STEM fields. To support this goal, GE has brought the Engineering is Elementary program into one of the K-8 schools in the partnership, as mentioned above. As that program grows, it is the intention of the volunteers to help other schools get involved and grow the footprint of STEM education from the earliest grades on.
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 GE/MPS STEM Partnership was formed through a desire from MPS to grow business partnerships and GE’s desire to be not only a good company, but a great company. The partnership consists of GE employee volunteers and the teachers in the five schools we support. 100% of the GE employees are volunteers. They are structured into a leadership team and five school teams.
The leadership team’s role is to recruit volunteers, manage the relationship with the school district, manage administrative needs, best practice share ideas, and support the five school’s needs. Each school team has a school leader, who is part of the leadership team and the group of 10-30 individual GE Volunteers.
The school leaders are the main point of contact with the classroom teachers and the volunteers. They communicate school and volunteer schedules, lesson plans, collect forms and data, and distribute general information to their team and the leadership team. They also problem solve, as issues or new ideas arise, they work to facilitate that with the teacher and volunteers. The roles of the school volunteers are to schedule their own time in the classroom to meet their work schedules, work in the classroom supporting the teachers and the curriculum. Their main goal is to interact with the students, support the learning and energizing the students to think and learn. The role of the teachers is crucial to success. They communicate scheduling changes and their weekly curriculum to the GE Volunteers, they also problem solve issues and ideas with the school leader. They offer direction to the volunteers and also encourage the volunteers to share of themselves with the students.
How are you building in accountability for students' successful STEM learning outcomes? Please provide a summary and examples.
Much of the accountability for this project is already built into the actual substance of the PLTW program. PLTW uses a series of nationally normed tests and portfolio assessments to make sure that students are on track for learning and achieving to their highest potential. PLTW uses the nationally recognized MAP testing, has on-line “end of course” exams used by numerous colleges and universities across the country to determine college credit and develops the skills for portfolio building for the children in the program from their earliest grades. A central part of PTLW is the integration of academic core subject matter – not just from science and math, but also from literacy and social studies. Students in this program perform in all competency areas measured by state standardized tests in Wisconsin at competitive levels.
GE Volunteers assist teachers with the support and real world experiences that consistently bring more value to the classroom to enrich the learning of students. The experiences from the GE/MPS Partnership is a central part of what engages and inspires students to improve their performance, stick with the program and eventually reap the rewards as they move on to college and careers.
Needs
Marketing/Media, Innovation/Ideas, Mentorship.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add needs that may not be listed.
The need is great and the needle of success needs to move on a large scale. We need more business partners and the community at large to understand STEM and help drive change in our community. We need to educate the community on STEM and continue building a focused approach; increasing the impact and maximizing the potential for MPS students and increasing their interaction with STEM learning opportunities.
Overall, this partnership exposes MPS students not only to STEM-related educational pathways and career opportunities, but also provides the local face of potential employers. In addition the partnership exposes the local GE employees to the needs in our own community, fostering the “it takes a village to raise a child” attitude. We need that idea to spread.
Offers
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 GE/MPS STEM Partnership is functioning and in many ways successful, however they are always looking for fresh ideas or ways to improve. They would be very interesting in sharing and collaborating with others. We have ideas to share and have ideas to learn about.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| hayes_-_2010.jpg | 961.68 KB |
- Login to post new content in this forum.
