Difference between revisions of "Team:Cornell/Engagement"

Learning So We Can Help Others Learn

We believe that the most effective scientific communication would come with some deliberate thought about what the best way to transfer knowledge and start a conversation really would be. That is why, before starting most of our community engagement work, we dedicated time to going to workshops and reflecting on our past work to improve our own skillset. 4H and Center for Teaching Excellence Facilitation Training 4H Cooperative Extension is a network of over 100 public universities that provide youth activities in experiences. Annually the organization organized a career explorations conference for high school and middle school students to introduce them to the wide variety of different STEM fields. Cornell iGEM hosted a class in this program about the intersection of science and business, and is described further below. However, through our participation we were able to actively improve and deeply consider the styles, methods, and techniques we employ with science communication. This is so important especially when talking about something like synthetic biology which has known as a point of controversy in the large public. In preparation for this event, 4H partnered with the Cornell Center for Teaching Excellence to provide effective training on how to convey and teach topics interactively and with a high level of engagement. Our proposed lesson plans were workshopped and we learned how to develop programs that would not only be exciting and capture the attention of our participants, but also lead to measurable learning outcomes. Inspired by the workshop we decided that we should apply Bloom’s Taxonomy into the work that we did with students. Bloom’s Taxonomy has a series of levels, seen in the diagram below.

As a teacher, we aimed for our participants to start at the bottom of the pyramid and work their way up. Based on the focus of every level, we developed learning objectives detailing what we would want the participants to learn and be able to do as a result. Through this we ensured the results of our programs would be measurable and significant. Reflecting on Past Work Outreach has been a major activity of our team for the last several seasons. We always try to provide the best workshops and lessons to students who attend our programs. We thoroughly evaluated our past programs to see what we needed to improve upon for new work that we did. Not only did we reflect on how the programs ourselves, but we read over all of the feedback forms that we had participants fill out at the end of every program. The major points we decided to focus on were: Creating more hands-on demonstrations and activities to teach Having presentations broken up with more activities and/or discussion Gauging audiences’ background before the start of the workshop to know whether to emphasize foundational biology concepts or more advanced material Providing chances within programs for participants to demonstrate and practice what they had learned Throughout the rest of our outreach we critically reflecting on the reactions of participants, participants’ engagement level, and participants’ grasp of new concepts. We continued to collect feedback forms. Creating the best programs requires development, and we decided to strive for continuous improvement.