Chapter 4 In-year Educator Support

Throughout the course of the year we found it important to remain in contact with the participating educators, checking in on their progress and providing support as needed. We use check-in emails to communicate information on the current stage of the program, any supplemental materials, and upcoming due dates for deliverables (i.e. the student mini-proposals). Through these touch points, we communicated with the educators about how they were progressing with the project in their classrooms, if they needed any help/clarification on materials, and how the students were responding to the project.

Additionally, we organized and facilitated up periodic webinars to review materials, deadlines, or general processes of the program. The frequency of check-ins varied depending on the needs of each cohort, however, generally we tried to check in at least once a month to keep in frequent, but not overwhelming amounts, contact. An example check-in email for the beginning of the year can be found here and a mid-project example email with a webinar invite can be found here.

As each school district had different schedules for the year it was important to make contact early in the year regarding the Student Research Symposium details to allow for adequate planning for the event (e.g., buses, field trip permission).If the date was not set during the Summer Educator Workshop, we worked to finalize the date in the early fall. Once the date was finalized, we then worked with the educators to remind and help them to acquire approval for their students to attend the event. Description for the setup and execution of the research symposium can be seen in the Student Research Symposium section.