Citizen Schools: Recruiting STEM experts to Advance Achievement, Lift Aspirations, and Re-Imagine Schools
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Eric
Schwarz
Citizen Schools
617-695-2300
308 Congress Street
More than 5 years
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Operating for 1‐5 years
Eric Schwarz and Ned Rimer founded Citizen Schools as an effort to reinvigorate learning and re-connect schools with their communities. They recognized that in the neighbourhood surrounding an urban school, most residents never enter the school building. Residents’ skills and experiences remain untapped while inside the school, teachers feel burdened by the breadth and depth of students’ needs. Eric and Ned also noted that students yearned for real-world projects led by authentic experts.
They piloted the idea for Citizen Schools in 1995 at a school in Boston. A former journalist, Eric’s students published a school newspaper. Trained as an EMT, Ned’s students became first responders for first aid needs across the school. In these “apprenticeships,” Eric and Ned created the model that has endured and expanded: citizens from diverse backgrounds and professions lead a course in which students create a product of authentic value.
In recent years, Eric – who continues to lead Citizen Schools as its CEO – has focused the expansion of the apprenticeship model on the STEM fields. STEM professional have a distinctive capacity to bring learning to life. In his chapter, “Calling All Citizens,” in the best-selling book Waiting for Superman, Eric highlights the opportunity for STEM volunteers to energize learning and introduce students to new disciplines and career possibilities.
Under Eric’s leadership, Citizen Schools is now leading coalitions of companies to deploy thousands of volunteers and advocating for policies that will foster citizen leadership in education.
Citizen Schools has recruited more than 8,000 volunteers to lead hands-on learning projects. It also has a track record of advancing student achievement and lifting school-wide performance. A series of rigorous evaluations reported that Citizen Schools’ students significantly out-performed their peers on leading indicators of educational attainment and advancement, including attendance, grades, and on-time graduation from high school. Schools that adopted an intensive Expanded Learning Time (ELT) model with Citizen Schools have dramatically improved proficiency rates in English and math. At one school, proficiency rates have tripled, and the school was transformed from one of the worst to one of the best in its district. It has eliminated the achievement gap in math and it has a long waiting list of students seeking to enroll.
In addition to advancing achievement, Citizen Schools can help to link current learning with future college aspirations and career opportunity. Students visit authentic workplaces – laboratories, research centers, and manufacturing facilities – as well as a series of college campuses. By linking students’ learning with authentic professionals and career pathways, Citizen Schools can motivate a new generation of rising stars to pursue STEM careers. At the same time, the volunteer service of legions of STEM volunteers will help to connect STEM professionals and STEM companies to their communities, investing their unique capacity to brighten the future of students and society.
1,001- 10,000
More than 10,000
To increase the flow of volunteers, Citizen Schools will grow its pipeline partnerships with science and technology companies, universities, laboratories, and industry associations. It will also develop a resource library of detailed curricula for apprenticeship courses that are aligned with national standards as well as an online platform to enable collaboration among volunteers across disciplines and regions. Just as they have at Google, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, and Fidelity, Citizen Schools volunteers will recruit their colleagues and peers to become Citizen Teachers. We anticipate that social media and online tools will create stronger linkages among volunteers, higher rates of retention, higher quality apprenticeships, and heightened advocacy for citizen leadership in education reform.
Schools can be insular institutions, unreceptive to volunteers and resistant to new approaches. The culture of schools and the demands of a narrow curriculum can pose barriers to Citizen Schools programs and the apprenticeship model. Unfortunately, teachers’ formative experiences rarely include co-teaching with a volunteer expert or integrating volunteer-led activities into their strategies to motivate students and build their skills.
Citizen Schools seeks to overcome this barrier by operating programs that extend the school day, creating more time and more flexibility to involve citizen educators. Citizen Schools also deploys a full-time staff member – the Teaching Fellow – to co-teach each apprenticeship session, ensuring that volunteers are supported and that students are engaged. To align volunteer-led activities with curricular standards, Citizen Schools develops detailed apprenticeship curricula and lesson plans. It also works closely with volunteers who want to design their own apprenticeships. Further, to help volunteers who have little experience working with young people, Citizen Schools has created CT Nation an online portal that fosters a community of practice among volunteers.
Citizen Schools has developed multifaceted partnerships with STEM companies that create mutual value. Many companies have reported that the benefits of volunteering with Citizen Schools extend far beyond the positive impact on students. For example:
• 79% of Citizen Schools’ volunteers report improved team-building skills as a result of teaching an apprenticeship.
• 80% report improved communication skills and 75% report improved public speaking and presentation skills.
• 63% report that apprenticeships provide good networking opportunities for volunteers.
Within their companies STEM volunteers can find teammates and can leverage one apprenticeship into many. Corporate workplaces and laboratories can also offer authentic venues in which to showcase students’ accomplishments and strengthen connections between learning and career possibilities.
Citizen Schools also partners with its host schools and with parents. Citizen Schools’ staff members regularly assist teachers with classroom activities and highlight students’ projects and progress in their apprenticeships. Staff members also call the parents of every students at least every two weeks in order to discuss the students’ progress and to listen to parents’ concerns and aspirations. Citizen Schools builds a spirit of teamwork and trust among the caring adults in each student’s life.
Citizen Schools receives financial support, locally and nationally, from a diverse base of foundations, corporations, and individual donors. Citizen Schools also taps local and state grant programs and receives support from its partner districts and schools. Citizen Schools has a track record of raising sufficient funds to implement its program fully and to operate it effectively.
Within the STEM fields, Citizen Schools has received significant funding support from Google, HP, Cisco, AOL, Microsoft, Cognizant, Biogen Idec, EMC, Cubist Pharmaceuticals. Many of these STEM companies also provide and support volunteers who lead apprenticeships in the STEM fields.
In 2010, Citizen Schools received a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to expand STEM apprenticeships and recruit STEM professionals as volunteers, with an emphasis on the information technology fields. Citizen Schools also receives funding from the AmeriCorps national service program, which supports the stipends of Citizen Schools’ Teaching Fellows, who co-teach apprenticeship courses with our STEM volunteers.
Citizen Schools informs its supporters regularly about its progress in lifting student achievement and instigating innovation and systemic change in the education system. Citizen Schools has a high rate of retention among the companies and foundations that have provided funding.
Citizen Schools will develop quality monitoring and rigorous evaluation systems to foster continuous improvement in its volunteer management systems and its apprenticeships. Across our network of extended learning programs, Abt Associates, a nationally esteemed evaluator, will conduct a rigorous assessment of gains in student achievement and students’ understanding of career opportunities and education requirements in the STEM fields. The evaluation will compare schools that partner intensively with Citizen Schools to a matched cohort of similar schools. Citizen Schools will also solicit and act on feedback from its STEM volunteers and its partner companies in order to improve recruitment and training methods as well as the support provided to volunteers during each apprenticeship session.
Citizen Schools will deepen its partnerships with its host schools, integrating STEM learning activities throughout the school day and enhancing school-based learning through corporate and community connections. Our staff members will document best practices for engaging students in hands-on projects and linking those projects to curricular standards. Citizen Schools will partner with Cognizant to develop a software platform that will enable teachers, volunteers and Citizen Schools staff members to share data about students’ learning and their progress. Citizen Schools also plans to partner with WGBH, a leading public broadcasting station, to create and disseminate training videos of effective instructional practices used in apprenticeships.
Citizen Schools STEM initiative will be implemented in full and deep partnership with its host schools and districts, as well as with STEM companies, universities, and community organizations. Since its founding in 1995, Citizen Schools has worked to forge powerful collaborations with its host schools and to link those schools to community resources. Most notably, the adults who live and work in the community are a vast and largely untapped source of experience and expertise. Citizen Schools strives to activate that resource, by inviting volunteers to share their unique skills and knowledge. Similarly, Citizen Schools reaches out to companies that seek to use their distinctive capacity in order to advance education and strengthen community. Apprenticeship courses enable STEM companies to introduce students to the vibrancy of STEM inquiry, to motivate students through relevant applications of their skills, and to the variety of career opportunities in emerging fields. In short, STEM apprenticeships bring learning to life.
In each of its state offices, Citizen Schools’ Director of Civic Engagement holds primary responsibility for developing and growing partnerships with companies and volunteers. The Director of Civic Engagement provides training, assists volunteers in developing apprenticeship curricula, and works with companies to welcome students, highlight career pathways, and host community celebrations of STEM learning.
At each of its program sites, Citizen Schools will set clear and high expectations for student achievement in STEM learning and will evaluate students’ progress rigorously. Citizen Schools has invested in comprehensive internal evaluation and accountability systems at both the school and organizational levels. Annually, Citizen Schools reports on student and school impact measures and uses this data to inform program improvements and set performance metrics for the coming year.
Citizen Schools will also commission a rigorous independent evaluation of the impact of its Expanded Learning Time programming on student achievement and school-wide performance. The evaluation, complemented by internal data collection, will include measures of academic improvement, knowledge and interest in STEM careers, skills that are correlated with preparation and success in the STEM workforce, and volunteer satisfaction and commitment.
In addition to these measures, in-school observations and surveys are expected to show substantially more time devoted to science learning and more of that time devoted to project-based learning that involves STEM professionals. Changes in teachers’ practices will be observed in traditional science classrooms and in other courses.
Investment, Human Resources/Talent, Research/Information, Innovation/Ideas.
Citizen Schools welcomes the collaboration of STEM professionals, STEM companies, and other related stakeholders to recruit volunteers who can lead apprenticeship courses with our students. For many volunteers, teaching middle schoolers about their field recalls the experiences that motivated them to pursue a STEM career. The credibility that STEM professionals bring to our programs inspires students and introduces them to new ideas and opportunities. Citizen Schools operates programs in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, and Texas. We also welcome referrals of outstanding college graduates and aspiring educators who have expertise in STEM disciplines and who can serve as Teaching Fellows and Campus Directors at our extended learning programs.
Human Resources/Talent, Innovation/Ideas.
Citizen Schools has developed effective practices for partnering with middle schools and extended learning programs to integrate STEM professionals and STEM projects. The core ideas and insights of our apprenticeship design are applicable to a wide variety of settings, and we would be glad to share our learning.
Citizen Schools’ Teaching Fellows represent a robust pipeline of talented educators, social entrepreneurs, and community builders. Teaching Fellows serve for two years at Citizen Schools as front-line instructors, mentors, and co-teachers with volunteers. They are extraordinarily dynamic educators, team members, project managers, and leaders. We are eager to inform them about career opportunities where they can expand their skills sets after their Fellowship.