These are all very good questions!  For now, I will address the mentor questions...

Recruiting mentors is a challenge, though there are ways to succeed.  First, we obtained specific letters of commitment from our two most prominent mentor sources, PPL and the city of Allentown, at the proposal level.  I personally met with people at PPL and the City before we got those letters.  I had a pretty good idea about specific people within each organization who would be most interested in this work via this process.

When we got funded, and it came time to recruit the actual mentors, we had written commitments. This helped for PPL as my contacts there recruited within their organization for me.  We were able to recruit three people from PPL.

However, the City of Allentown was going through political turmoil as the mayor had been indicted on federal charges. (He has since been found guilty.). I was asked to delay my recruitment of city workers for a year.  But, once I got in the door, I was able to recruit their GIS office people, a Zoning Officer (featured in our video!), and also someone from public works.

This personalization of mentor recruitment is what worked for us.  We needed to establish relationships with each person to get them "hooked" into our project.  We then needed to work with their schedules to get them into the classroom to work with students (via a Google sheet).  This required lots of patience and perseverance. For example, our arborist from PPL was unable to work with students this past Fall as he was in Florida for many weeks helping with hurricane recovery.

To sum up, yes, mentors can be recruited for projects like this.  However, large numbers are challenging.  Cultivate relationships with individuals, make them feel welcome, give them appropriate training, and spend time with mentors!

Hi Courtney,

As one of the instructors I can speak to the technology integration.  Thankfully, the grant afforded us the ability for a great deal of PD so that I and my fellow instructors could learn the technology, which then enabled us to turn around and support the students.  Having mentors on the team who were skilled in the GIS was important, because as students were taking their first steps with the technology we had more hands on deck to help support them.  We have worked with the research team every step of the way to fit these investigations into the scope and sequence of our curriculum - both in science and in social studies - and that is definitely a work in progress that takes a few tries to get right.  I'm a firm believer in making sure technology serves the learning goals, not vice versa.  This level of GIS is definitely not plug-n-play, so teachers interested in bringing this tool into their classroom need to be prepared to give some time to technology instruction - both for themselves, and then for their students.  The good news is that we were able to create some engaging, scavenger-hunt-like activities to teach students the tools.

Hi Courtney.

We used a hybrid professional development (PD) model that includes both face-to-face and online learning activities to promote teacher geospatial pedagogical content knowledge.  Additional information about this can be found in this publication:

Hammond, T.C., Bodzin, A., Anastasio, D., Holland, B., Popejoy, K., Sahagian, D., Rutzmoser, S., Carrigan, J., & Farina, W. (2018). “You know you can do this, right?”: Developing geospatial technological pedagogical content knowledge (GS-TPACK) and enhancing teachers’ cartographic behaviors with Socio-Environmental Science Investigations (SESI). Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 45(4), 305-318.

We are pilot-testing the SESI investigations this year and and are gathering our posttest data at this time.

Thank you for sharing these helpful resources! And, for all of the above comments explaining in more detail how you built rapport, developed relationships, and gained commitment from key stakeholders. The insights into the PD from  Shannon's perspective highlight how beneficial a close researcher-practitioner relationship can be! I'd  love to hear more from the researcher's side about the benefits of this close research/practice relationship.

Courtney: Others may wish to chime in here, but part of my reaction is what I previously posted (see my response to a question from Melissa Demetrikopoulos elsewhere in this forum): working with teachers extends the imaginative reach of the researchers, allowing us to grasp the disciplinary structures that they're working in or the specific needs of their student community. Doing design and development work WITHOUT teacher-collaborators is, in my view, not a good idea. The classroom is a very constrained ecology, with multiple conflicting pressures (for example: covering the curriculum vs. assessment of student learning vs. administrative tasks). Teachers can navigate this ecology better than university folks, even those of us who logged previous decades as classroom teachers. When I work with in-service teachers, I have much more faith in the final products, both as an instructional product AND as a research finding.  

Hi Barbara,

As a social studies educator, my favorite thing about this project is how it helps students take content from one area (environmental science) and turn it into a tool for thinking about their community and how they'd shape that community in the future.  Students use the collection tool to study concepts they've learned in science class - for example, taking temperature readings, or observing tree coverage - and then looking at how they might apply what they've learned to support proposals for resources they'd like added to their neighborhoods in the future (how will they protect the environment while adding new sources of recreation, or create jobs?  How can they reuse vacant and/or abandoned sites within the city to better meet human needs without increasing the urban heat island effect?  How can they create bike paths or opportunities to reduce the carbon emissions that come from our transportation choices?)

In short, we're teaching them about the role of urban planning in ensuring our cities grow in smart ways, rather than experiencing the negative effects of urban sprawl.

Hi Barbara.

We have great feedback from our external program evaluators that have told us that we are on the right track with our design and development work, our professional development approach (see CaGIS article posted elsewhere in thread) and with the optimization of our data collection instrumentation that we piloted in year one.  

No research data yet. We are finishing up pilot-testing this school year and will be field-testing next year.

Hi Cary.

As it is their first use of GIS, students used a combination of data they collected in the field and data layers that we created/found for them.  We have not yet had them go so far as to create the geospatial data layers themselves.  It is my hope that in future years (these students are freshmen) that our colleagues will leverage these students growing skills and take them farther with the tool.  Bringing other teachers up to speed in ArcGIS is a focus of our summer PD this year.  

Students used ArcGIS for a total of 6 investigations and 3 projects this year, spread throughout the school year.  We also built in some introductory GIS-supported scavenger hunts in the beginning of the year to help introduce them to the tech.  During our investigations, our classes operate in block schedules - 90 minutes 4 days a week plus one 45 minute period on the 5th day.  Having that extended time is definitely a bonus, especially on data collection days.

I'd say the students have become fairly skilled at manipulating data layers, using map notes to annotate their maps and prepare them for use in their own projects, and using the measuring tools and data tables (sorting, filtering) to get the most of the data in front of them.  Hopefully in later years they'll be able to go further and source their own data.

Hi Cary.

In our first year of the project - prototype testing - we learned it took students a bit of time to login with an assigned ID and password, learn how to download maps to the Collector app and set the data collection area.  It also took some students some time during the first and second investigations to get use to using the ArcGIS online tool suite - drawing on maps, querying, etc. No issue with the actual data collection.  We purposefully set the data collection fields to be intuitive with many drop-down selections when possible.  We also set the initial ArcGIS.com data displays to hep make geospatial relationships more readily apparent.

From the learning experience, we decided it would be in our best interest to develop 2 scavenger hunt activities to get used to these interfaces and activities.  We implemented this during the weeks 2 and 3 of the school year and it worked well. These were each 2-day learning activities.  By the time we got to the first investigation, students were up and running quickly with little downtime on GIS-related procedural tasks.

Student choice is vital to sustaining their engagement.  We created increasing opportunities for choice as the year went on - at the beginning of the year they were given very narrow parameters (explore the school property and use the GIS to make the case for a location to plant new trees).  By the end-of-year culminating project, students were given their choice of a Ward within the city of Allentown, and told to make one recommendation of an addition to the built environment that would provide an opportunity for growth in a way with environmental, social, and economic benefits.  Students had freedom over the ideas they brought forth and the data they used to make their case.  

These culminating projects are being wrapped up as I type, but I can tell you I've seen some very inventive proposals - I'm currently reading about a gym that allows you to was your clothes in a laundromat while you work out.  

One of the crucial elements to keeping student interest is making the real-world applications real.  The tree planting proposal I mentioned?  Our school district, with the support of the City's Shade Tree Commission, has committed to selecting one student proposal and following through with an actual tree planting.  Students will see the results of their learning in the real world.

I love the commitments to implement one of the student proposals!  That extra connection to the real world should really help motivate the students (and teachers) with their projects.  Knowing that what they are doing is bigger than another class project is great.  Very cool project, and I look forward to learning more about it.

Kevin

As the social studies teacher in question, I can give you my two cents.  You're right...science and social studies have a history of behaving like the Sharks and the Jets in secondary ed.  It requires a mindset change for some social studies teachers to open their doors (and minds!) to science, and for science teachers to connect their work to civics.  Some teachers who are new to this mindset have a bit of a "you got your peanut butter on my chocolate!" reaction at first.

In our case, I've always included the impact of scientific discovery on history and politics in my teaching, so it wasn't a stretch at all.  I have questions about any social studies teacher who hasn't - and upon reflection, most realize they have.  This combination is also a great opportunity for teachers to model the practices of lifelong learners:  I'm not shy about letting students know that the science is new to me, and sometimes we have to call out to my scientific partner in crime for help.  

I think there is shared frustration within social studies teachers that students - and even educational institutions - don't always see the relevance of our subject area.  By empowering social studies to be the link between any learning and the outside world, we create a new, powerful context for the skills we teach.  It has been my experience that most social studies teachers can buy in to that.

btw - the buy-in goes both ways.  A feather in my personal cap is that at a mid-year PD, when I challenged our building teacher to declare the one enduring understanding that they want students to have retained 5 years from now, my science partner's answer was "how science can be the basis of decision making in our communities."  Social Studies goals for the win!

Shannon's response got me thinking about the history of social studies as being a content area that is sometimes yoked to another part of the curriculum. Case in point: Humanities-driven curricula, in which history and language arts are taught in either a unified course or as linked courses. (Consider, as an example: reading The Red Badge of Courage in English class at the same time as covering the Civil War unit in history class, perhaps with crossover assignments between the two teachers.) The concept of a humanities curriculum has the force of tradition behind it--a classical education, after all, was humanities-focused--and is reinforced in the No Child Left Behind Era as an opportunity to enlist social studies as a means to boost students' reading and writing scores.  

Our experience suggests that social studies and science make a very natural pairing, particularly when focused on geospatial inquiry.  

Are you developing new instruments for this work (particularly measuring spacial learning attitudes and attitudes toward geospatial technology) or drawing on existing instruments for STEM learning and career interest? 

We have used existing instruments, subscales from existing instruments, and newly developed instruments.  Based on our Rasch and classical analyses in year 1, the existing measures have been modified for better reliability.