Citizen Schools’ Apprenticeship model has been shown through external evaluation to increase middle school students’ interest in STEM careers and proficiency in Math (comparable to 4 additional months of learning).
Citizen Schools’ design team has been working to develop a pilot that will allow us to engage more students in this style of learning as part of their science classes. Taking what we have learned about developing high interest, project-based learning courses with STEM in the out of school time, we set out to design an in-school model co-designed by science teachers and STEM volunteers.
This session will share the key volunteer engagement strategies we’ve developed for inclusion in our project-based learning units and model the design –based research methods we’ve used to evaluate and refine our resources for the model.
Come with an idea you have for a student project to workshop. The final component of the session with guide participants in a protocol to brainstorm their own curricular units they may want to develop (using our templates and online resources) that would be bolstered by the relevance, rigor and joy that volunteers can add to a project for middle school students – We’ll work in small groups to identify roles that STEM professionals could potentially play in supporting student’s authentic project work, and potential sources for recruiting those volunteers to bring the project to life!