Event ID: 1638069
Event Started: 10/23/2010 8:20:38 AM ET
Please standby for realtime caption text.

Good morning. Let's try it again.

Good morning.

I am not going to use this podium because if you look carefully we have a ratio and proportion problem here so I will be over here. I am Kathleen Bergin with the National Science Foundation and I work in the education and human resources directorate. And Jennifer and the committee have been nice enough to allow Mary and I to facilitate today. Our job is to stay on time. We got the red jacket memo. I see a few of you got this message as well.

I would like to be Cap yesterday. So, do not run to a mic, to save really loudly -- say really loudly three big takeaways. Somebody jump up and give it to me. It's Saturday morning, jump up.

Yes, sir? The difference between research and evaluation. Their purpose is very different. Does everybody agree?

Great takeaways.

Another take away? Yes, sir?

Importance of internalizing the aspect of diversity. It has many dimensions. It had all sorts of dimensions not just ethnicity and gender. Do you come from a family rich in heritage? We all do. Is that family still their supporting you? We heard some situations that were not. A diversity message is important court to work.

One more.

Teacher research and its ability to help change teacher practice. Awesome. I was going to try to figure these out but I said wait a minute, I do not have to do that.

Is quickly about today. Today's about sustainability. Today's about transfer. Today it's about communication. All of those overlap; right?The pattern of the days the same people we are together, not together, in small groups. Instead of one speaker you'll be having panels. The panels emanate from you. So voices from the field are very profound. Right?

Before I introduce Mary so she can introduce our first panel I want to give you something you can take home. I would like every teacher in here to think of it right down the name of one student that is really struggling that they are working with.

I want every professor in here to write down the name of one student that they are working with that is really struggling. If you do not fall into that category I want you to think of one person who is not a member of your family. I cannot choose my son. That is struggling that you want to work with. Everybody is writing the name down. You are almost threw it right their complete name. Like my name is Kathleen Frances Bergin. Does everybody have a name down? I need a teacher hand.

This is Amy Jamison.

What is the name of your student?

Roy Williams. Wrong.

The name of your student is Ray Williams Jamison.

I need a professor. The name of your struggling student?

Hector Castilla Kimbro

I need one other somebody.

You just -- you already got it. I have done this with faculty that were all principals and administrators and they took it home and they did it for the rest of the year. If you put your last name on the name of any struggling student watch what you do and what happens to that.

So this is Ann Wright-Macler.

The name of your struggling student is --

[ Indiscernible ]

Business Mary Poats. She is a program officer at the science foundation and she works with RIT and engineering and she'll introduce our first panel -- this is Mary Poats.

Good morning you all. That is a tough act to follow. I tell you [ laughter ]

I am pleased to introduce our panel moderator for the first panel this morning, sustainability. Gail Showcroft. Gail is a marine biologists -- geologists, I'm so sorry. The first 18 years of her career focused on climate reconstruction and change. She and her colleagues developed early climate modules over the past 5 million years that have formed the foundation for modern climate change models. Gail has published multiple manuscripts on her research preachy began conducting education and outreach programs in the mid-19 90s on climate change and gradual -- gradually switched career paths, focused on ocean and climate science education and outreach. She and her team at the University of Rhode Island's graduate school of oceanography have developed several award-winning Ocean science websites including the popular discovery of sound in the seat and the new hurricanes. She has had a great deal of experience developing and administering a variety of educational outreach programs including the teacher research experience program, the Armada project. Gail is currently the Executive Director of the national network comprised of 16 centers around the country. She is also teaching graduate courses in oceanography and climate change for educators and lecturers internationally on improving science education and bringing global environmental issues into speesixteen -- into K-16 classrooms. The first number is Susan Peary, Janet Will Burton, Art Steward and Claire Duggin. So, Gail?

[ applause ]

Good morning folks. I would like our panelists to please come up and as they wait -- they make their way up here I would like to thank Jennifer and Liz for making a fabulous conference and NOAA and NSF in allowing this community to come together again. I hope you are enjoying yourselves and continue to enjoy the rest of our program today.

Without further ado I would like to begin our session this morning. The way it's going to work is each panelist will be given ten minutes to speak. We will hold all of the questions until all of the panelists have spoken. So if you do have a question, please write it down so you do not forget and we will deal with questions in the end. We will start right away with our first speaker who will be Susan. Susan is a fellow program assistant director of partnership and research development. Elected member of the week County Board of Education in North Carolina from 1999-2007 that she was involved in efforts to guide and build public support for a high-quality suburban and urban school system which he served as a share for two years and as the porch chair from 20003-2005. She holds a BA in biology from Lawrence University and an MS in education from the University of Utah. She formerly worked as assistant curator of education for the New York society and has extensive experience as a volunteer in North Carolina and is responsible for securing resources for its elite fellowship that targets outstanding public-school teachers from across North Carolina. So Susan will be our first speaker to discuss sustainability.

Thank you very much. It's such an honor to be here today and I have learned so much just yesterday for listening to and talking to all of you. I hope our program can be helpful to you in the same way. Let me start by saying about waterpark or looks like we offer competitive fellowship to speech while public-school teachers across disciplines. It's a little bit unusual in that way. Each fellow is partners with the University or innovative scientists 45 week summer research experience. Our objectives are to see that each teacher develops an awareness of fast developing new research. But they become part of a team that is actually doing hands-on science in working with the scientific method. And we want the teachers to have an opportunity to observe current practices and basically to come back to the classroom with an idea of what kinds of career opportunities are available for students out there. Recruiting is extremely important to us as you can imagine. You know there are serious professional challenges to make the translation between what is going on in the lab and what happens in a classroom in a way that is effective and meaningful and hopefully replicable. So we worked very hard. We could just personal interviews with the applicants could we require recommendations for ministers and make sure that the research project at the teachers involved in is related to the teaching responsibilities that they have. Storm at each fellow is possible for introducing innovative curriculum and conducting outreach.

Do I do this myself? Sorry about that. Okay. We have had 100 -- in the ten years of the program -- 127 fellowships and there will be 30 new fellowships available next year. You'll be working in all 100 counties of North Carolina. The range of topics as varied from robotics and value added agriculture to biotechnology, ITD technology and forensics. The big cluster of fellowships in the middle of the map there is due to a grant from NSF that we received particularly related to the base realignment and closure realignment that will bring tens of thousands of new residents into the area.

We also have coming up this year a cluster of massive fellowships funded by a grant that will fund aviation and aerospace research fellowships. A whole range of opportunities for teachers. We have been engaged in the past year basically in a very extensive sustainability and scalability effort. We see ourselves as been engaged in a long-term initiative to build a network called work of well-informed competent teachers who can engage students with contemporary content that locally is relevant to them. We want these teachers to know how to make use of the connections we help them to build and to make that help in -- happened with the resources available to us we really have to consider sustainability in every aspect of what we do.

First in the program. We have spent a lot of times this year working on redesigning the program with the objective of improving access for teachers and maximizing the impact that those have. We looked at everything from the little details like the back they gave us on the temperature of the room and food to working with our College of education and research institution on the anti-state University campus to learn about best practices in education that we hope to incorporate our program. We used our annual evaluations that are conducted of the program to provide feedback as well.

This resulted in a number of changes. We made our program works concise. We've put a lot more emphasis on outreach in order to really, really pushed the impacts that these well-trained teachers could have and we are focusing a lot more on our alumni. We use a newsletter to reach out to existing demos into alumni as well so that people could we have implemented a new three-tiered outreach expectation that all of our fellows will implement and contact outreach in three different settings to other teachers. We have built Master teacher advisors into the program because we really felt that teachers could benefit from having a lot more coaching during the time they were involved in the research internship. Several times we conduct fireside chats. We give alumni and current fellows and their current mentors to engage with notable figures in science and local policy leaders. He was no doubt Laureate Dr. Oliver smitten.

Funniness and is to say an ongoing challenge for us. It's a given, something we spend a lot of time on -- funding is to say an ongoing challenge for us. We find that if we are doing things right in the program are fund-raising often equates with religious telling the story about what we are doing is making a compelling case for the kind of impact these teachers could have paid so everybody in the organization is involved in fundraising. Sometimes our fellows are are very best advocates.

We have begun emphasizing collaboration. There's a lot of activity going on related with stem education and there are a lot of initiatives working to address what we know is for us in North Carolina a very serious problem. We believe that our ability to leverage the fellows impact requires us to have a well-defined role in that broader scheme of things could we do not build ourselves as being the silver bullet to this problem, but we do say we are very critical -- a very critical part of the solution and we are trying to maximize the results by incorporating fellowship into other efforts that are taking place in some of our states here. Just a few of those in North Carolina. The Gates funded initiative for local grassroots support for stem education. There is jobs commission joining our business and schools also working to create a stronger the between the businesses and education in schools. Lastly is building public awareness. It helps us gain support, financial support for the program. It's very beneficial and that it connects us with other practitioners. The use of the master teacher advisors in our program is something we have learned about through conversations with Jennifer and it has been a real asset to our program. Lastly and most importantly it leverages the impact that fellows can have.

If other educators, community leaders, school of ministers, district level people know what these teachers have put into these fellowships and know how competent they are when they walk out the door and what they continue to contribute, we can get a lot more bang for buck so that has been buried important for us.

We spend a lot of time on the road could we go around and talk to community leaders. We talk to educators, chambers of Congress, all kinds of people in making that case.

We have also done a little bit of an advertising campaign. We had a donation of support help us to sort of. The organization to make it more visible to people in a way that could be more meaningful. This is one of the mailers that we produce. We did a video of the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words. And to close I just want to finish with a comment that was made by our recent -- and a recent Board of advisors meeting. Some military jargon has crept into our presentation because of all of the work we're doing in the back area and AC oh oh of a very large hospital are most into the presentation that we gave -- BRACC area and a COO up a hospital came into the presentation that we gave and he said you know, special forces units do not just prepare to be searchers. They prepare to be teachers. They do not send out numbers. They send out very special people so our sustainability plan and our ongoing efforts to work on that are really about finding the smartest approach to build a critical mass in North Carolina of these very special teachers. Thanks very much.

[ applause ]

Thank you, Susan. Our next speaker is chanted. -- is Janet she's part of a organization based in Fairbanks, Alaska and and she administers a letter projects such as TREC, teachers and researchers exploring and collaborating, polar TREC and CARE connecting Arctic and Antarctic researchers paid shooters responsible for several innovative programs and has been designing and implementing programs for five years and has extensive experience in curriculum development. Prior to this she studied walruses and work for several federal agencies in Alaska. She has strong collaborations to the research communities and a passion for all things polar. Janet?

[ applause ]

Good morning. It's a real privilege to be here today and I think that conveners for inviting us out as a team to come to this workshop as well as speak of here about sustainability although I have more questions than I have answers. Hopefully I will learn something appear to.

Before it began talking about sustainability I want to give you a little bit more background about ARCIS. We are a nonprofit member-based organization and we are located in Fairbanks, Alaska. One of our goals is to help the Arctic scientific community reach out and share their science with the public and Polar TREC is one of the many things that we do just to give you a little bit of a background about that. This afternoon we will have posters about the Polar TREC program. I will not go into many components of its because we do have some alumni here to share that with you this afternoon. One of the things about preprogrammed is that it is a TRE and replace teachers with Arctic and Antarctic researchers so they get too close to some really cool places -- replace teachers with Arctic and Antarctic researchers.

Yesterday we talked about defining terms and this morning I will talk a little bit about what sustainability looks like through Polar TREC and what we see for sustainability.

Sustainability is quality and Susan touched on all of these in her presentation so we won't be reiterating a lot of terms in different ways. You cannot have sustainability without some kind of quality and we were fortunate that we started the process at the very beginning. We took great ideas from our model -- TEA and some other great programs and pull them together and said what worked for you in but did not work for you to build our program? That has helped to complete the sustainability and we do that through Polar TREC by program design and good professional development and prepare teachers before they go out in the field and like Susan we have a rich and complicated process for matching teachers to the field. And all helps toward sustainability.

Sustainability is resourcefulness. We are constantly looking for partnerships and collaboration and thinking outside the box and being ready to take on whatever comes our way and see if it can help us meet our goals. For Polar TREC this means that we work and partner with other TREs. I have had the good fortune of working with Jennifer and Gail and we have been able to pick up funding and we managed to stretch our program a little bit further by building these partnerships and being resourceful. Sustainability also needs to be funded. To some degree -- it does not have to be your initial program but you need to keep up ongoing support of our alumni and participants.

This is not always easy. A member-based organization but are money does not go specifically towards Polar TREC. But we look for other low grades and again we are resourceful to bring people together for workshops and things like that. Sustainability is about connection like everybody else, you know, long after the research experience people need to stay connected, et cetera. And Polar TREC we support and encourage the students through a variety of tools people need to do social networking could we have Facebook, Twitter, we have a website. We also do face to face interactions by providing some funding for site visits. If the teacher needs to go to the lab to learn more about how data is processed or the researcher needs to come to the classroom to share.

We also do it through professional development webinars. We work with others in polar science climate studies and climate changes is a major topic of discussion and were a lot of educators want to get background knowledge so we provide webinars. And those webinars are put on by us at ARCUS. But the presenters are scientists in the field or teachers that have been working with the scientists.

We have a listserv and then we have been CARE network which is a network of teachers and researchers. Really an opportunity for them to talk virtually about these different issues. Sustainability is also sharing.

We cannot expect people to want to continue partnering our program without sharing the information and experience and the data. I have got to say this is probably the weakest point not only for us but for most TREs. We usually do not have people on our team or working with all of the data and I think it's in our best interest that we put more article does a group out like Jay's article about what is going on. It may not be science or the cover of Rolling Stone or anything but it should be [ laughter ]

We need to spend more time could we are just beginning there's at the program level. Starting to get data about where teachers have taken these experiences and how they have transferred into their classrooms and that kind of thing. So we are starting to as a program level. In Susan's group we have also leveraged our alumni and have them go out and present act -- not education conferences, at science conferences to help bringing the researchers into our group and let them know about what is going on and how they need to have an educator on their team.

Sustainability is about need. You know, sometimes you do not need it anymore. That is not the case for a TREs for programs to come and go but sometimes it's about a need and whether you need to have that program anymore or that activity in which it has been fulfilled it goes away.

For Polar TREC again, we are just scratching the surface. My dream -- I have a dream -- that all teachers that go to get certified in nanotechnology Advanced Technology engineering and math will come out and have as they go through this certification a hands-on field experience. An apprenticeship, if you will. That would be wonderful. In the meantime we are just trying to get the critical mass thing going in our area as well and I think there is still a huge need. And also ARCUS serves the scientific community and the sciences still see a need.

It is about passion and we would not be doing this if we were not passion about education. Sustainability is about -- with my final point -- sustainability is about adaptability. Polar TREC has learned to adapt to the needs of our participants. The changes with education and things like that. We have done this recently we have been thinking on how we can do different kinds of levels of support. As we started to grow Polar TREC has only been in existence for seven years and some of our alumni and participants have formed wonderful bonds and yet there is no funding or way to continue that collaboration could we are trying to look at different levels of support and how to adapt our grants to those different levels and our programs. I have to say that NOAA is probably the greatest example of adaptability. I know 20 years ago education did not look the same. And NOAA did not look the same but yet a teacher at Sea program has managed to adapt so we should all pin down Jennifer and ask for what they did for that.

Anyway, that is how I have got for now, and thank you very much.

[ applause ]

Thank you, Janet. Our next the greater will be Art Stewart but he works for Oak Ridge University and leads the Academy creating teacher scientist program at Oak Ridge national laboratory. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees at Northern, Arizona University and botany and Michigan State University and his MS in ad at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He worked at Oak Ridge national laboratory for 17 years as an ecologist and eco-pathologist and group leader while moonlighting as a prize winning essayist and poet. In addition to this, books and technical reports -- many of which are boring, he says [ laughter ] -- has been published in numerous anthologies and three books of highly regarded science flavored poems and essays all published in his latest book "Circle, Turtle, Ashes" emphasizes that -- so Amazon.com Art Stewart [ laughter ]

[ applause ]

You find the information starting to move faster and faster and faster and in order to keep up with it you have to start dialing the information and I made the mistake -- I became very interested in the notion of scientific literacy and the problem was I went literacy, science and everything got mixed up.

Nonetheless I would like to say the program I will talk about his highly decorated and you can tell that because of the large number of nice logos on the bottom . We have a -- logos from the various sponsors. What I will be talking to you about is the ground up. I will start at the bottom and give you a nut and bolts look at sustainability from inside of this Academy creating teacher scientist program at Oak Ridge national laboratories. We take -- or we help DOE implement that program.

I will be focusing on best management practices from within the program. Leveraging is one of the things that we need to work on specifically in this program. We have three kinds. First we run another program referred to as the Appalachia commission program and this is involving high school students and teachers. That little program provides us an opportunity, to say Peter program of teachers for our ACTS program. Otherwise he would have issues recruiting would have issues recruiting and that's an important issue. It really feeds us good candidates and we get a firsthand look at them before we accept them as ACTS candidates.

We get a little bit of funding through Oak Ridge national laboratory and most comes from the Department of energy but that again, sustainability component. One of the important features, the teachers do a lot of things they make impacts and do things out in the field that show that the program works and that is a huge component of sustainability from within any program. It's how effective the teachers actually are.

Best management practices. The things that we do that I think are important in making our program work locally. We use a common lodging facility. We bring teachers and most of them do not know each other to start with. It's really important when you throw them into a research environment they need some kind of opportunity to bond and get to know each other and a common lodging facility really works well for that. They do a lot of things and emphasize that point they be favorably.

We also give them a 30 hour nature science short course during there first year of the three-year program. That gets them together one day a week approximately. They get to share experiences, talk to each other, reinforce their own activities and that is a good group kind of thing for all of them. We also have been built -- they have built a wiki site. They post a lot of their information. They take responsibility for owning and operating it. That is another good point of contact that helps them develop as a program.

The three-year program as implemented at Oak Ridge national laboratory focuses on different things each of the three years. They have about 80% of their time committed to research. That is common across all of the years. The first is an emphasis on content and knowledge. The second is an emphasis on data analysis in the classroom at our school systems. The 30th emphasis is on leadership skills, fumigation skills, what is it take to get out there and get things to happen from their point of view in the classroom.

So each year the students and teachers know what they will be focusing on the transit gives them a little package of information rather than smearing it uniformly across all figures. Another kind of funding opportunity.

We use evaluation of the lawsuit. -- evaluations up the wazoo to find out what is working and what is not working so well and that is a really important contribution. Finally I'll mention towards the end you may have currently for the first time a number of the teachers starting to work together to go back into the classrooms. They have a shared research project, shared science education research project they are conducted in the classroom. So they are not just getting a research experience at Oak Ridge national laboratory they are taking their skills back into the classroom and using them bare. We have access to student information so we are going to find out a lot more about what works and what does not work for a pretty strong experimental design. The teachers take ownership of that activity and is very effective.

The number one problem or issue I think from the ground up kind of look at how these programs work is a good match between the mentors and teachers. To do that we select the best candidates weekend and then we really have to pay attention to what their interests and abilities are before they get in the door there so we can make the right match to the right mentors. We are blessed in a way of having a lot of good mentors but if you make a bad match, if it's not a good resort match -- that a good research match it does not benefit anybody.

We note most teachers do the same mentors for all three years. If there is a problem in the first year, we reassign things and catch as early as we can.

An important issue associated with that sustainability locally is, are the mentors happy with the candidates that we provide with them? If they are not, they are not going to ask for more teachers and therefore we cannot place the teachers and we have a problem so it's important to get information about the mentors willingness to proceed. We did a survey recently. We had 21 ventures involved and 14 Keithley responses and the answers are -- well they do the same teacher or different teachers? The answer was yes, yes, yes, so I take that as an indication that the mentors are happy.

We also have happy teachers. The mentors are organized, they have necessary skills through these are all things which the teachers grade the mentors highly on.

The way we think and operate presently we are capped out at about 30 to 40 teachers could we cannot place more than that because of a the number of mentors we have available. That is our limit and also something we cannot -- cannot do a lot more of the same kind of thing. We think that some of the design features could be done elsewhere.

The last slide. The project that we are working on now that the teachers are doing and the classroom is on days eureka.org website and students take a look at these news articles and discuss them and learn about who is doing what where and where that research is being done and they discuss what are the priority issues. They get to choose the research article so it's a powerful way for students to get engaged with leading edge science kinds of activities. They do not have to go to Fox news -- they can go here and learn what is really happening. They seem to appreciate it. A large majority of the students involved in these projects indicate that they are more intrigued about science, more interested in considering it as a future. Thank you.

[ applause ]

Are final panelists this morning is Clare Dugan. She is a program director for the REC program. She has led K-12 program efforts in collaboration with several research centers since 1988, including the NSF engineering research Center and the newly established Department of Homeland Security. Claire currently leads a number of education efforts including a residential middle school science camp to direct university student support for some of Boston's lowest performing schools. So we welcome Claire to the program.

[ applause ]

Claire forgot to submit her bio, too [ laughter ]

So moving toward sustainability and I know we have been listening to each of the teachers and talking about key components and have been listening over the last day or so really common elements in all of these initiatives across the agency. I am going to give you an overview of how we garnered institutional support as Northeastern University and happily build capacity through not only this program but other initiatives.

So again the RET program was in collaboration with recorded center which is a NSF ERC and began with a small cohort of teachers and now has approximately 20 teachers that are primarily middle school secondary teachers in middle school college faculty.

It has been a collaborative effort and Dr. Michael, Filbrick Donna and we began our work in the late 80s in response to the gathering storm.

One thing that is foundational to all the work that we are doing is to get the faculty to increase their awareness of what is going on in the K-12 environment. So we conduct workshops. Dr. Klopp Daschle runs a program on how to teach their own practices. Clear we still struggle with this. But we have reached a point that we have a sufficient number of faculty that I actually turned faculty -- I actually turned faculty away from programs each year because I have to many that would like to join.

What are some of the critical components in your institution to build these initiatives? Be it a RET effort or any other program components? Leadership that is committed to educational outreach. Recognition for faculty and students engaged in the outreach. Recognition from the state and district leaders. This is one of the things that teachers have got to our attention is the fact that programs like RET are not visible at state and district levels for traditional development models continue to be supported. A strong partnerships with the teachers. The RET has been a gateway program for us to go after a number of other grants and programs that have supported these districts at a much larger scale. And again diversifying funding bases I think what you heard from all of my colleagues is the fact that you cannot rely on one source of support to sustain these initiatives. It also has to become part of the culture. I'm lucky that many of the faculty because they have become so struck by participating in the program but have had such an impact on them and their students that these programs are written into many other initiatives from career awards for young faculty to our research office constantly saying, please go back, talk to Claire Dugan to see what you can crash for your educational component.

Again, reports like this we are all familiar with rising above the gathering storm and win new reports are issued and they make the case for the programs that you seek to implement at your institution, bring them to the attention of the leadership of the institution. This only reinforces -- RET started long before the "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." I run a listserv and sometimes I run brown bag lunches so people are aware of what the national recommendations are and what they are really a part of.

The center for stem education has a number of programs and we have joined forces and we put our brands under one program umbrella and also some support from the EMC Corporation to allow us to continue our work and continue initiatives so improving stem teaching, increasing the number of students.These are critical components and RET is one of those initiatives. We run summer AP courses, precalculus program, or university students are engaged in learning vote in the summer programs like RET and also in the classroom but I had undergraduates who are intent lower performing schools that I directly interacted with the current industry.

We have the Center for stem now again I think we know why we are engaging teachers in research and what impact is going on within that environment. Again, just to reinforce what is going on for teachers in this environment, deepening the content knowledge and developing leadership. The RET program I often consider my program as the driver of the bus but the program is driven by the participants in each year I learned so much from the program because of the wonderful teachers that are part of the program. They continue to be his shape what the program is offering and providing to the next year's participants.

So extending content knowledge, introducing research, these are all common characteristics of all of our programs. The goals of the RET program specifically at Northeastern to implement a comprehensive RHA program that includes an engineering research component in supporting professional development.

Even though we have funding from a variety of sources engineering does permeate. Developing curriculum materials. It is as much about process as it is about products that I could have a petitioner that has a product that might be ready for publication but a novice teacher just beginning to think about how they can take research and bring it back into the classroom environment.

Again, creating the model and building an entire committee. We reached out on the week and two elementary schools to engage in the committee college faculty and including community college students in our RET program.

Key components are similar, six week some research, being able to link curriculum. We use source material such as how people learn, getting results. Clearly the compelling pieces what the teachers feel empowered to bring back to the classroom.

I am going to wrap up with a short video. I think several of my colleagues have talked about the fact we need to continue to increase the visibility of this program. I am very lucky for the hundreds of applicants for the RET program and my high school program. Matching the RET points and teams and placing them in labs with the right mentors is critical. The Jimmy to keep the visibility of this program current and out of the mainstream because we have many of the key institutions that are looking to hold fast to traditional development models.

RET is people intensive. It requires HR this commitment by the faculty that is seeking be able to help people in their lives. I wanted to give you a sense of a short video that we have now on YouTube. Teachers and students work hand-in-hand in the research laboratories. This will give you a quick idea.

Our summer opportunities for teachers, community college students and high school students to actually get introduced to the approach of Northeastern University.

We worked in a lab with Dr. Migy.

The parents are struck with the level of participation and research.

I worked on investigating jet fuel is using gas chromatography.

He here we had a laser.

Just been able to be a part of real research. I never thought I would never be interested in wastewater treatment.

This an interest in providing these kinds of opportunities so students make informed decisions and are more likely to stay in stem majors in college is.

I had not been interested in engineering but as I went throughout the summer through the different fields it struck my interest.

I wanted to understand more about things I would not get to learn in school that were more unusual and get to actually see what I would do if I were to pursue sense as a career.

Students need hands-on. They need real-world connections.

Research experience for teachers to bring real-world connections to their science classrooms really is a recommendation made nationally as Northeastern has risen to the challenge.

The RET program is that just about to the research and put it together and it's also showing ways to reach students.

By practicing the water sampling and.

I will have much more confidence when I go into the classroom.

The science teachers were familiar with the questions. They were familiar with a lot of the laboratory methods that were used. So really were able to hit the ground running.

What we learn from each other was amazing. I think that is the best part of the way the program is structured.

It's transformational for each of us. For the students, laboratories, the university administrators better part of the process.

This has been one of the best programs that have come across. What I really want to do it again and I want to bring my students and. They are so open here to bringing ideas in and try to help you make it work.

[ applause ]

I would like to give a round of applause to all of our speakers.

[ applause ]

Now we can open it up for questions.

The fellow -- That is Mariann I think actually. Please state your name.

I am Marianne but I would like to ask Claire or anyone who can answer I appreciate your ideas are getting faculty more interested in teacher education in taking on even high school students as participants. I would like more of those ideas. It has been an uphill struggle especially in the scientist people in my department are not interested in collaborating on education or research oriented of articles. If they are on a tenure track, et cetera they have to publish in their field, et cetera. What are some of the ideas about engaging other faculty members and the need for this and what you provide for them.

Again, we started with building a community to introduce faculty to an number of things that were going on in our local school systems. You mentioned about opportunities for funding. Clearly many research grants now require a K-12 component. So I actually have faculty constantly coming to my door saying, can I get involved in K-12 outreach in some way because I want to put in a proposal and I know nothing about this arena. So happy to teachers in the laboratory I suggest is one of the first introductions to the K-12 environment. Because it focuses on building relationships with two people. It breaks down a lot of the barriers for them to think about going out into the schools and building for the relationships. Now that we have the momentum they have seen many other faculty's successful at securing funding and that it did not compromise the research. I think that is one of the things in partnering with research Center for so many years when we are doing educational outreach and placing a teacher or student in the lab we have to be respectful that we are not looking to optimize the research in that lab during the summer. So the faculty as a committee support each other. The professor here had a new faculty member that has just gotten involved in the RET program that he mentored, too in terms of thinking about what is a reasonable project. Clearly it does take time. It is a window of time. It is six weeks versus ask if somebody can you visit schools throughout an entire school year when, in fact, they do not have that time. For us that a successful that we do have the momentum but I would ask some of the faculty here that are committed to share their perspective to the program, too.

Can I just add one thing to that? I concur with everything that could have said about that. One of the things we try really hard to do is work with the faculty and expressed an interest up front to kind of carefully articulate what the experience could look like and how they could make use of a team rather than being the sole supporter of this fellowship and it does help if we can help them manage especially if they are first-timers to the program. The other thing that made a big difference for us we work with universities and colleges across the state. Some of the places where we have had the most welcoming and enthusiastic reception are colleges in the rural areas. A faculty member simply have to have the opportunity to be involved in a program like this before. There's lots of initial enthusiasm and we have had some fellowship from these can be.

And my perspective what works the best dispatchers who have a good experience. Share that information with other prospective mentors peer word-of-mouth. It tends to be slow but is very effective within a stable system. So that is what we depend on very heavily.

I am not faculty or anything, but our experience in trying to work with universities is actually working with graduate students and early career scientists seem to be the most effective. They are studying -- so they do not have time, but they are not constrained by being panel members and reading proposals and all of these things so trying to find somebody early in their career and for that matter match it seems to be well worth the time. Plus you get the researcher early in their career so they tend to build on that experience and a more capable and more likely to put into their grant because they see it as a way to reach all of these federal requests.

Another question. How about right here? Wait for the microphone.

So actually as a fourth-year graduate student I wanted to add onto what Janet was saying about early career. I think graduate student in postop so the ones doing 90% of your mentoring anyways so skip the middleman and go straight there.

[ laughter ]

Especially postdoc. If you have a large medical center whether it's a teaching hospital or a lot of medical research going on postdocs are there for years unfortunately. They are also putting together their Korea grants. There first NSF proposals and they are in the lab -- -- they're Korea grants, there first NSF proposals so I would same target graduate students and postdocs that they have their own mailing lists and communities paid a lot of schools now are starting to have ASE chapters that have come together with an interest in education and am certain that there are analogs for other disciplines so I would recommend targeting mentors firsthand.

Questions for our panelists? Jay, in the back?

Thanks. Thank you for your presentation. The video was fabless. I loved it. On one of your slides you had increased student achievement there was an asterisk. Can you tell us what that was for?

Yes, it wasn't asterisk to our program.

[ laughter ]

-- was an asterisk to our program.

I have bored with 32 different school districts and now five committee colleges -- have worked with 32 different school districts could we are not collecting the kind of data that you collected working with the New York City schools. They're working extensively with the city of Boston but we have been more teacher focused.

I actually had about five other slides after the video but we are collecting again, what the impact has been in terms of curriculum implementation of particular programs and not so much about student data.

Certain programs that we have been working with if we focused heavily on AP support or other things we are able to garner looking at student impact data from the test scores and other things.