It is far too long since I have posted on this blog. I have been neglecting things; what with working toward my dissertation research and life in general, I have put aside these blog posts. It is finally time to resume posting and begin reporting on my new job. Starting June 6^th, 2023 I am an Education Program Specialist at Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City. My responsibilities are diverse and include traveling out to schools throughout Utah during the school year to present workshops to teachers and present astronomy activities in sixth grade classrooms. I also have other duties as assigned.

In Utah elementary schools, space science content and standards are part of the 4^th and 6^th grade curricula. 4^th grade students study observable patterns in the sky, including evidence that the Earth rotates (such as the cycle sof day and night, change in the length of shadows, and seasonal changes in nighttime constellations), and the apparent brightness of our sun compared to other stars because of its relative distance. We do train teachers in kinesthetic activities for 4^th grade teachers and students that show how the Earth’s day and night relate to the sun and stars, but our primary focus and funding is for sixth grade students and teachers.

Sixth grade has three space science objectives in the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) standards, which are borrowed from the Next Generation Science Standards and include Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), the core content of each grade level; Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs), such as using models, computational thinking, data analysis, arguing from evidence, and science communication; and Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs), common ideas that cut across all scientific disciplines such as patterns, cycles, scale, proportion, time, and space. For Utah, the sixth grade standards include: 6.1.1: To develop models to explain the patterns of the lunar phases, solar and lunar eclipses, and the seasons; 6.1.2: To develop models to explain how gravity and inertia affect the orbital motions of the planets and other solar system objects; and 6.1.3: To use computational thinking and data analysis to explain the scale, proportions, and properties of the planets and other objects.

I join two other specialists who have their own niches. We all share going out to schools to make presentations and teach workshops, and we hit every public school in Utah every other year (except charter schools, who are on a three-year rotation). This works out to about 230 school visits per year between the three of us and some part time education staff. We do not go to private schools, and we hit every school district every year, so that some small rural schools see us more often. We also have other responsibilities. Thomas Quayle is over scheduling our part-time presenters and volunteers who do the planetarium dome shows and our Science on a Sphere presentations, help with summer camps, and do much of the daily teaching in the planetarium. Jason Trump is our new education supervisor and is the Assistant Director of Education and Outreach for the PUNCH mission, representing the planetarium in our partnership with Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, CO and several other groups. I help with this including planning for the upcoming annular solar eclipse on Oct. 14. He also is over scheduling and coordinating our school visits and a number of other tasks.

The Annular Eclipse:

As for me, I was assigned several responsibilities off the bat by my supervisor, Nick Hoffman, who left the planetarium for another opportunity just three weeks after I arrived. We have purchased enough eclipse glasses to send to all 6^th grade students and teachers in the state, which is about 122,000 pairs, and I have calculated how many glasses to box up and distribute to all the schools as well as packaging the glasses with instructions. I had a great deal of help from the part-time staff, and we did most of the packaging iin August and early September. Since the start of September we have been distributing the glasses to all of the school districts. For rural schools, we drove the glasses out to the regional service centers in Richfield, Price, Cedar City, and Heber City and for the larger Wasatch Front districts we drove them to the district offices. This has been a good task for me in order to learn the names of all of the schools out there and to meet the science specialists, but I have done quite a bit of traveling. In Utah, 6^th grade is sometimes in elementary schools and sometimes in middle schools depending on the district (and in one district they even have intermediate schools). I have had to go through the Utah State Board of Education site and fall enrollment projections to look up the numbers in each school. Nick had already created most of the labels we needed, but there were changes over the summer such as one district moving all of its sixth graders from elementary to middle schools. As of last week (the final week of September) we mailed out the last of the boxes to all of Utah’s charter schools that have sixth grade (over 100). I am beginning to hear back that the glasses have been received, and in time for the Oct. 14 eclipse. It has been a monumental task, but it is done. Hooray!

Dissertation Research Project:

Knowing that I still have a huge need to complete my dissertation research, I was left with a quandary. I have been teaching at a private school in Provo this last year, helping to train the science teachers there how to implement project-based learning and designing the new lab station and science curricula. It was a good experience. I worked half-time so that I could have more time for writing up the first three chapters of my dissertation, which must be approved and defended before my committee before I can start the actual research data collection. My project was complex (go figure, knowing me) and required creating a series of flipped training videos on how to use browser-based media design software. I got about 16 videos completed and posted on my YouTube channel and tried to implement them with the students I taught last year, only to find that Generation Z (the Zoomers) learn quite differently than I am used to teaching. Instead of watching a 30-minute training video, stopping it to practice software or a task, they are used to smaller bites of training such as one would find on Tik Tok – two minute mini-lessons. So I now need to chop up my videos into smaller, more exciting bits, post them to Tik Tok, and create a channel for Digital Media Mini-Lessons (hmm – I should trademark that . . .). This is going to take even more time.

Meanwhile, I created a new website to include project ideas, links to the videos, and other resources. It hasn’t exactly gone viral yet, but it allows me to link teachers to a one-stop-shopping site for using digital media in science classrooms. Here is the link: https://science-creativity.com. Let me know what you think.

I did have all the science students at that school do several projects during the year, including a nice project on DNA transcription, replication, and translation where the students could choose which type of animation to create. I developed a 3D model of student choice, and working with my dissertation advisor, made choice boards and student choice a central feature of my research. I also instituted the STEAM Showcase program that I have done at other schools, where teams of students choose a science topic from the year and work up a 15-minute mini lesson that includes a script/outline, presentation of information, demonstration or activity, and a handout for further information. They presented their chosen projects to each other for feedback, then made revisions and presented them again to our elementary classes downstairs, then revised again and added the handout and presented for a final time to their parents and our middle school classes at an afternoon Showcase event. We took over five classrooms for five sessions, with 25 presentations altogether, documented everything, and got some good data.

We also had a weekly Stanford Innovation Lab class modeled after the d.school at Stanford University, where students use human-centered design principles to build innovative projects that solve problems in communities. As teachers we went out and found potential client businesses and institutions, then divided the students into ten teams to work through the design process. They were having a hard time making headway, so I used the idea of choice boards to create an open checklist that required teams to complete certain required tasks at each step of the design process but then also complete a set number of other tasks, with more listed than they needed to do so that they had a measure of bounded choice. They were asked to complete five out of seven, or nine out of twelve tasks, for example. As they completed the required number, I would check off that step and they were then allowed to go on to the next step, with tight deadlines as to when each step should be completed. All teams started making progress and those that followed the steps and deadlines the closest had the best results by far and won $100 each fot the best project as judged by a panel of judges at our presentation day in May.

Now all of this would have made an excellent dissertation research project but I was so slow at getting my initial three chapters done that the proposal defense has not yet happened. So, without approval, I cannot count the data we gathered. It will at least become two or three excellent articles for peer reviewed journals, and perhaps I will be able to quote myself in my final dissertation. It wasn’t wasted effort, but I am still hanging around as ABD.

Part-time work isn’t enough to live on for very long, so I had to find a full-time position. I applied at several universities including for a 3D animation professorship at Utah Valley University (didn’t even get an interview) and two positions at Brigham Young University (nothing there either). But when I saw that an Education Specialist position was open at Clark Planetarium, I jumped on it. I had had my eyes open for this opportunity for five years, ever since I interviewed for a similar position but was beat out by someone who had more experience in informal education. This time I was accepted.

So I was left with a difficult situation: how to fulfill the mission of the planetarium and the responsibilities of my new full-time position while also creating a means to gather data on student-created digital media projects in science classrooms, the central question of my dissertation. Then a brainstorm hit me: what if I proposed a contest for Utah students for science communication, one of the SEPs of the Utah SEEd standards? Students would fulfill specific content standards while creating their own science media to effectively communicate the concepts. We would have participating teachers go through training workshops, then they would have their students compete in eight categories such as best article, best illustration, best podcast, best video, and so on. It could work! So I wrote up the proposal and presented it first to my supervisor (before he left) and then to the Education Programs Director and overall Planetarium Director. They were all enthusiastic about the idea, especially since it will involve continuing support and training for teachers during the contest. We often go out and present one-and-done workshops without really following up on how well teachers are implementing our programs or providing the needed support; this will provide a new model for our training and collect a great deal of data that can be used to improve the program in subsequent years. For this year, it will be a pilot program and can be placed under our Utah iSEE (Informal Science Education Enhancement) funding as long as it is directed at sixth grade students.

Things are progressing well. My dissertation committee chairperson has given approval, the State Science specialist for elementary schools has approved, and I have now created a descriptive flyer and advertisement for the program. We had this posted in the monthly science newsletter and sent out the flyers with the eclipse glasses. We held a kick-off event for the contest at the Utah Science Teaching Association’s annual conference on Sept. 15 and signed teachers up, and I have started the training workshops (more on this in a later post). Everything is falling into place for what will be a great research project.

I hope to recruit some teachers to participate in the contest who will go through the workshop training, some who participate who are not trained, and some to merely act as an untrained and non-participating control group. I hope to get at least ten teachers in each group. Data I collect will include teacher surveys, workshop feedback forms, student project descriptions, peer evaluation forms, and the student projects themselves as artifacts. This will provide both quantitative and qualitative data for a mixed-methods approach.

Now I just have to get that gul durned proposal completed. I’ve hit a snag in that I came down with a 1.4 cm kidney stone during the summer and it certainly put a crimp in my style (and a hitch in my giddy-up). I also had a series of ear infections that were painful, but I am back in business and back on track for my research project to begin. Wish me luck!

School Visits:

Now that the school year is progressing we are beginning to visit schools. We have mostly been providing training and presentations on the scale and proportions of the solar system (standard 6.1.3).and gravity and inertia (standard 6.1.2). I have been to nine schools now, including four schools in Cache Valley, three of which were in one week alone (on three different days – quite a bit of driving and long hours involved). I’ve racked up enough comp time for these long days that I was able to take two days off, one to celebrate my wife’s birthday and one for a doctor’s appointment and to work on my dissertation proposal. We try to hit all parts of the standards, including the core ideas, the science and engineering practices (using models and computational thinking) and the crosscutting concepts of patterns, cycles, scale, and proportion. The lessons are typically one hour and we do anywhere from two to six lessons per school. One school in Logan required two of us doing six presentations simultaneously, teaching over 300 students in one day. So far I have presented to about 1044 students and around 75 teachers with all we are doing.

On top of this, we provided training sessions for local libraries and teacher groups to help them prepare events for the annular eclipse on Oct. 14, which crossed southern Utah. We’ve done other training workshops for districts on how to use the various kits that were sent out to them, including a session at Davis School District on how to use the Reasons for the Seasons and Lunar Phases kits. We had 14 teachers in a 2.5 hour workshop, and I also visited an elementary school in Cedar Hills that day, so it was a long day and about 14 hours worked. I have also presented a session at the UtSTA conference (more on this in a later post), manned a booth at STEM Fest at the Mountain America Expo Center, and helped out with events surrounding the return of the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission to asteroid Bennu, which landed out in Utah’s west desert. I will talk about this in a later post, too. I also need to report on the road trip I took with my family this summer to the Black Hills and Devil’s Tower. It has been an eventful four months.

In my next post I will explain more about the education programs and organization of Clark Planetarium and how informal education institutions can contribute so much to classroom education. I’ll take you through typical a day here. Then a post on UtSTA, STEM Fest, and OSIRIS-REx (or maybe two), and more. By then, I will also need to report on how the contest is going and how the data collection for my dissertation research is progressing. I hope this will settle down a bit once the eclipse is done – we’ve had an unusually busy season. I expect things will remain intense for me through next May and the projected (longed for) completion of my doctorate. We are planning a family cruise at the end of next June, and that will be greatly needed as a celebration of earning my doctorate.