Engineering Resilience: Creative Community Building for Teachers!
At the start of this pandemic, WMSI’s way of accomplishing it’s mission of engaging students and teachers with hands-on STEM abruptly came to a halt. Visiting 5-8 schools in a week, interacting with hundreds of people, and coming in close proximity to busy builders was far too risky for our staff and our community. The weeks preceding the shutdown were filled with busy virtual whiteboard brainstorms, calls to stakeholders, and so much uncertainty. Throughout all of this unknown, we were guided by our mission and the idea that problems become easier when we bring people together.
This blog will focus on several creative ways in which we brought people (specifically teachers) together this summer to celebrate creativity and solve common challenges.
We began our community-building for teachers this summer by working closely with our expert partners at Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO): an organization that first helped WMSI become a reality, and has partnered with us on many projects throughout the years. Our goals were to support teachers in finding new ways to increase the engagement, independence, and collaboration opportunities for their students.
Through many Zoom calls and Miro brainstorm sessions, the CEEO and WMSI identified several ways we could collaborate in order to help teachers and schools this summer. These ideas included: joint webinars, a Coffee Hour, and the Summer Learning Community.
Coffee Hour
While I can safely say that WMSI prefers to work in person, virtual meetings have a strong silver lining: they allow anyone with decent internet speeds to connect to others without the limitations of geography, transportation, time, etc.
We wanted to take advantage of this fact and bring teachers together from a variety of areas. We had a driving question to answer: what would happen if we offered a central place for teachers to gather and discuss common challenges? As a teacher, there is usually very little time for collaboration with colleagues at your school, let alone peers from other schools. We thought that bringing passionate teachers together could decrease the amount of “reinventing the wheel” at partner schools. Not only that, but we thought these gatherings could create space for much needed joy and connectedness during this crisis.
We started Coffee Hour by organizing a webinar to discuss summer challenges. CEEO and WMSI marketed the free webinar to our contact lists and partner schools. 110 people signed up - clearly teachers wanted to talk! During this webinar, we put out a “call to arms” to teachers, asking them to take part in our summer communities. The energy and warmth from the response was overwhelming!
Our Coffee Hour started 2 weeks later, with 20 people in our Zoom room. During our first session we chatted and tested out an innovative virtual space called Gather Town. Each Coffee Hour was fun and informal - teachers brought fun coffee mugs, cracked jokes, and enjoyed the company of their peers. During Coffee Hours, we explored tools together, asked good questions, and broke off into small groups to discuss solutions. Coffee Hour quickly grew, with teachers tuning in from all across the world! (see below)
Coffee Hour bloomed beyond our wildest expectations, allowing educators around the world to talk shop. Teachers from the Philippines wanted to talk robotics, New Yorkers discussed their at-home STEM lessons, Massachusetts folks distributed helpful websites - just to name a few examples. Our group was held together with a common passion for engaging students, along with a common problem to solve: how do we engage our students within the constraints of a pandemic?
Summer Learning Community
WMSI and Tufts also organized a program called the Summer Learning Community (SLC for short) during the summer. This was a more regular gathering of the same 15 educators each week. Meeting 5 times over the summer, the group bonded closely and tackled problems together. Below is the group’s first brainstorm using an Innovator’s Compass, a tool for finding ways to solve problems
The SLC worked on ideas for building community, lessons for appreciating diversity and being open-minded, at-home project-based lessons, and much more! Moreover, the SLC became a tight-knit team. One SLC member went as far as to say “I feel closer to this group than any other group that I’m a part of”. This buy-in and trust allowed us to talk about some challenging topics with strength, perspective, and empathy.
We also enjoyed moments of levity and shared experience. Two SLC members, one from Northern New Hampshire and the other from New York City, shared codes for dancing robots, allowing one member to program a robot to dance in a different state (see below). We also had a very active Discord channel (similar to Slack) with multiple themed threads that SLC members updated regularly as they found resources and new ways forward. We deeply appreciated and were surprised by this depth of connection.
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YSLtJis2BQ&w=854&h=480]
Workshops and Such
WMSI also worked to train teachers through various workshops this summer! One exciting happening this fall is that FIRST LEGO League competition decided to hold their competitions remotely, giving schools and students a chance to take part in engaging extra-curricular activities. To support competition prep, we worked with teachers from New Hampshire, Texas, and Arizona on robotics building, coding skills, and remote robotics ideas during a two-day workshop this August.
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S07MkYhd_qw&w=854&h=480]
Day of Code
At the very end of the summer, WMSI supported teachers with computer science integration for the fall. Each teacher in our “Day of Code” cohort chose a unit they would normally run; once equipped with this unit, we worked with the teachers to prepare it for the fall, integrating the lesson with computer science, as well as preparing it to be done in a virtual setting. We capped off this workgroup by meeting in person, outdoors, and socially distant, which allowed us to better collaborate on and celebrate the new units!
Overall, this summer’s experiences impressed upon us how important community is to move forward. Our shared teacher networks gave a place to commiserate, collaborate, and get excited about teaching again; moreover, this was a shared space where we could foster a sense of shared responsibility for each other. We look forward to continuing our community networks in order to support our mission of growing creative problem solvers!