Build Foundational Community Support

For science, math, and technology educational reform to take hold and grow at your school, you first need to develop a foundation of community support. It is certainly not necessary to convert the entire school community, but at a minimum, you will need individuals at the district and school leadership (i.e. principle or headmaster) levels who will commit to supporting your efforts. You will also need a team of at least 2-3 teachers who can collaborate in building the environment and staffing it in the early days. It doesn't hurt to also recruit a few parents with science-oriented children to the WISE cause, because sometimes administrators listen to them more than they listen to teachers, and they can often contribute real-world scientific and technical experience.

The good news is that what you need most in the early days is moral support that doesn't cost anything as long as the teachers agree they won't short their teaching responsibilities.

Get Connected to the WISE Network

Once you have your all-star team assembled and fired-up, your next key goal should be for each of you to become part of the collaborative WISE network so that we at WISE can help you, and all of the WISE students and teachers and schools can learn from one another. WISE is a NATIONAL scale network of schools which means that traditional water-cooler and teacher's-lounge models of teacher collaboration will not suffice. Your team will need to commit to learning and installing some of the latest telecommunications software for email, messaging, and video-conferencing. That way, you can instantly message, chat, and actually show WISE collaborators what you are doing, and ask them questions about what they are doing. These modern practices are absolutely vital to allow the entire national WISE network to help you.

(This may sound like an insurmountable challenge to a busy teacher, but in reality, it is incredibly easy and completely free. WISE can help get you set up in just a few moments. If you want to get started right away, install Skype and Yahoo Instant Messenger on all of your computers, and email us your user IDs. We will then use this information to add you to the WISE network. Once you try it, you may just wonder how you lived without these capabilities before!

By taking this important step, you will be modeling modern scientific practices for your students when you collaborate with other teachers and schools. The way you regularly demonstrate brainstorming about ongoing activities and being open to improving your pedagogy, classroom, and lab practices is exactly the same way scientists and engineers collaborate on their research and development projects. Plus, you will be amazed at the range of interesting topics discussed in the weekly open WISE video conferences and how that time investment can actually decrease your class preparation load as you leverage national support for you lessons. (Click on the green links to read about some of the topics covered in one recent online meeting including: geodesic dome construction for a student-built planetarium, electrostatic generators and detectors, Bean Beatle genetic experiments, student demonstrations of their FIRST robots, and engineering software simulations.)

This step, along with regular presence on, and participation in, the WISE network is so critical to our philosophy and methods that it is a prerequisite to qualifying for a WISE fellowship or school grant to help you complete the remaining steps.
» Call or Email us to Get Connected

Build a WISE Lab

A WISE lab is simply a space to which students have open access when they are free, either before or after school, or during lunch or recess. Think of it as the science and technology equivalent of the school library. It doesn't need to be a large space, nor does it need expensive benches or furniture. Even folding tables will do, though we have had excellent results with the sturdy, yet still inexpensive, wooden IKEA dining room tables. The key goal is to provide equipment, parts, tools, and materials so that there is always something interesting to fiddle with when a student happens by. It should be a place where students can come in, start fiddling, and leave their project set up so they can return to it later and keep fiddling.

Obviously what you provide should depend on the grade levels you are supporting (Check the WISE student and teacher blogs for ideas.) There is no need for expensive equipment or components in the early days. The key is to get it started with a setup for a few simple projects, and then have teachers and students contribute scavenging and flea market skills on an ongoing basis.

For example, we have set up labs with less than $5,000 of initial tools, computers, software, and parts (much of which can be donated free of charge) to start with simple electronics and robotics projects. Later additions have ranged from Marine Biology environments and setups for synthetic DNA experiments, to tables and parts and tools to compete in the FIRST robotics competitions, to support for classroom laboratory exercise extensions, and so on. If you run out of ideas here, ...
» Call or Email us if you have any questions

Staff the WISE Lab

Even though the goal of setting up a WISE lab is ultimately to get students self-motivated and conducting their own research and development projects, it is important that the room be supervised with a mentor who can both offer guidance and support in explorations AND prevent student excitement from devolving into activities such as soldering iron fencing matches. This supervision requirement combined with the free and open access goal means that you will need to figure out who is going to cover the room, and when.

The ultimate goal should be to have an experienced researcher on full-time staff who has had at least a few years of laboratory management and student exploration/research supervision experience in the WISE lab for at least 40 hours per week. But those folks are hard to come by, and most schools don't start off with any budget allocated to non-teaching staff. The reality of science and engineering, though, is that if you want to be prepared for students to DO science instead of just hearing about how others do it, then there is a LOT of infrastructure, planning, setup, parts and materials ordering, and activity planning that has to happen in the background, and most teachers don't have time to do all that much of the support function. The US schools with the strongest science, technology, and math programs have all adopted this model. (See IMSA, and Thomas Jefferson High School as examples.)

So how does a school end up at the goal line of a full-time Lab Director type person when it starts with no extra people and no extra budget? The answer is that you have to bootstrap the effort with team support.

The team that you assembled up in step 01 above needs to divide the workload, and commit between them to conducting study halls and perhaps eating lunches in the WISE Lab, or staying in a little late or coming in a little early, and taking the occasional road trip over the weekend for the various fairs and tournaments. The second set of brother-in-arms you have at your displosal are parent mentors. Any adult with even the slightest curiosity and interest in science or robotics can supervise while both learning and teaching important lessons.

Finally, don't forget the WISE team and network. We are all here to support these very efforts. Use us. Once students become aware that using the networked software tools they can ask questions of any WISE member anywhere, and almost any time, your job will get a lot easier.

Once your WISE program has managed to accrue even a modest budget, other staffing options emerge. Many of our WISE University partners have undergraduate and graduate students looking for internships (often subsidized by the university), and many of these innovative youngsters make for perfect WISE Lab staff. There's nothing like cheap and motivated student labor. If you are having trouble finding interns from local universities, let us know and we will connect you.

Another model that some schools are trying is to hire one extra teacher for a department while decreasing the total number of classes each individual teacher must teach. The extra hour per day of "release" time can be used to good effect in both collaboratively sharing planning and teaching loads, and for staffing the WISE Lab.
» Call or Email us if you have any questions

Host Regular WISE Activities and Events

Many students have never had any experience in science or engineering whatsoever outside of being spoon-fed lectures and lab exercises with pre-determined steps. It is really no surprise that many schools educate the creativity out of students when they hardly ever give students regular chances to discover their own path and truly innovate.

The problem with this lack of preparation is that if you simply take such a student and put them in a room outfitted with the coolest and latest scientific and engineering tools, parts, and materials, they are lost and haven't the slightest idea of where to start or even imagine what they might try to do.

But all is not lost, because it turns out to be rather straightforward to design very interesting introductory activities that teach students fundamental skills, and guide them down a path of progressively more complex reasoning, planning, and problem solving. All while they are learning the science subject matter. The key is to use activities which give them regular practice in the PROCESS of science.

This needs to be a regular effort, however, and not a big push up-front with little follow-through. We would recommend a minimum of one new planned activity per month, in addition to whatever activities go on in support of the regular science classes and labs. WISE labs have had good success with activities such as: an electronic insect design project/contest, a solar robot race, a fish breeding (genetic) contest, a group wetlands biosystem design and construction project, and a custom planetarium design project. See the WISE blogs for more ideas.

Even better events get students out of the classroom and innovating in the real world, at other schools, universities and nearby companies. You would be surprised how many executives and university researchers would LOVE to host a WISE event at their place, or stop by to mentor an activity related to their work..

If you really want to be WISE superstars, host an event or contest and invite all your neighboring schools to participate! Spread the WISE word! (Often you can get businesses to donate prizes and charge nominal entry fees to cover expenses.) And do let us know so we can post it on the WISE Web. If it looks like a really good event, it's not out of the question that one of the WISE staff could visit and help you plan, organize, and manage it!
» Call or Email us if you need ideas or have suggestions

Share What You Have Learned

Scientific and technical innovations can only have societal impact if they are published and shared. The scientific community at large is only as strong the contributions of its members. Similarly, WISE will only be as useful as its members make it. If you try something that really works, or if you have an idea or even a comment on an already posted idea, SHARE IT WITH THE COMMUNITY ! Join us on an open WISE video conference, or post it on one of the Blogs. (Please email us if you would like to become a blog contributor. We even encourage students to contribute!)

And don't be shy about looking around in the real world for support and professional development and funding opportunities. Apply for a sabbatical at a research university or corporate laboratory. Attend conferences, and (ghasp), PRESENT A PAPER like the rennaisance educators/scientists (or engineers) you have become! Tell the world about your innovations in both science and education.

If you make it this far, you are a WISE school indeed, and we are happy to have you as friends and collaborators.
»Email us to become a Blog contributor or learn more about sabbaticals