Experience and Background of Participants
Whether you are providing professional development for internal staff members, for volunteers, or for a local community based organization (CBO), it is critical to first ask participants about their experiences and expectations.
Ask participants:
- Have you ever led science or engineering activities with children?
- Will you be directly leading the activities with children or will you train others to do so?
- Have you had positive experiences with science and engineering in or out of school?
- What are you expecting to walk away with after the professional development sessions?
It is safe to assume that the activity leaders you are working with will have a wide range of experience, skills, and familiarity with leading science and engineering activities with youth. Adults working in out-of-school programs come to this work from varying backgrounds. Many are college students who are interested in working with children, some may come from a recreation background, but usually only a few come prepared through training in teaching. Typically, they have little or no experience leading science or engineering activities with children and may have had little exposure to science content themselves. Your design for professional development should take into account a diversity of teaching skills and science knowledge in order to best support participants implementation of hands-on science and engineering activities.
If the group of adults you are working with is primarily new to science and engineering, then you will want to make it a priority that they have positive and successful experiences with science and engineering activities themselves. Obviously, they will be more inclined to lead these types of activities if they can directly see their value for children. The main reason we suggest having activity leaders do the science activities is to provide familiarity with the processes the children encounter as they do the activities, as well as to help model effective activity-leading techniques.
It is important to stress that an extensive science or engineering background is not necessary in order to successfully lead these types of activities with children. The main goal for this type of professional development is to motivate the participants to take on the challenge of leading hands-on inquiry-based activities. To be successful in this endeavor, they must be supported through learning successful techniques for conducting hands-on activities, develop a basic understanding of science and engineering processes, and anticipate how to handle a variety of implementation issues.
