Austin

I appreciate that you talked about the peer to peer relationship when it comes to getting students excited, it is so important for them to see that it's ok to be excited with their peers!

The word "capable" is so important when it comes to students feeling like they are making a difference!

Kate - Wow it's great to see that you have done so much citizen science projects with your students. I'm sure of all the options you've given them, everyone is able to grasp onto at least one that peeks their interest over time.

Hi Sue, I love that you have thought out of the box since you don't have sustained students, it's a unique style of education, but the same final goal can still be reached! I like that you focused in on the spiders too!

What citizen-science project did you do? We started collecting monarch butterfly caterpillars and eggs to raise and release. There are a few sites that take this information so we have a few students using different ones. What challenges, if any, did you experience? So far our only challenge has been how to get the most kids invested. Even though we have the same students all summer, each day we have different students so it's been a challenge to allow them all the same 'first experience' with collecting and observing as we can only handle so many on sight. We have followed up each day on locations, status, size, stage, etc. but the most excited kids were the ones who made the initial discovery, not the ones who are following up on another students finding. What learning outcomes might you expect from having your students participate in this project? We hope the students will learn the basics of monarchs and their life stages. We hope they learn the important of milkweed in our area and will help protect the plants to directly help protect the species. We want them to learn the unique relationship that monarchs have created with milkweed and we want them to just enjoy and have fun with nature!

The most impactful thing was how LOUD sitting QUIET is sometimes. We practice using our senses a lot in our programs when we are out in nature. I've created all these practices based off of my own experience with opening my senses but now that I'm the mentor it's easy to slip out of practice and focus on being the teacher instead of the learner. We utilize an incredible nature awareness book written by Jon Young called Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature for a lot of our nature senses activities and I would highly recommend that book to any informal or non-formal educator. We are lucky enough to have 40 acres on our  organizations property that we can utilize for activities and lessons. Over the years my students have started to develop trails, outdoor classrooms, and most of all, connections to our mountainside in the Rocky Mountains.

1. Position youth as people who do science. Specifically with teenagers who's brains are as a cognitive stage of self focus, teens want to be believe they are making a difference due to their actions. We allow teens to engage curiosity from day one and we don't often offer answers for their questions, we offer guidance and more resources. We educate as if every teen is an 'explorer in the making' to make sure we drive their curiosity NOT stifle it. Teenagers want to feel satisfaction and empowerment through their actions, and this is what our citizen science project allows them to feel. 2. Frame the work globally and locally. Our teen program travels around the nation and the world focusing on just this! We also educate in a way that allows all teens to look as conservation from a local, regional, national, and global perspective. We focus a lot on humane education which allows our teens to gain and improve empathy for cultures around the world as we tackle tough conservation topics. 3. Attend to the unexpected. My team and I are experts at attending the unexpected! We are in a non-formal, informal education realm and we thrive on the unexpected. If something changes course due to a students passion or drive of curiosity we will change courses as often as we need to to fan the flame. Our teens are used to not being given the answers from us so that practice also takes the shock away from the unexpected, but that's the state we all focus on.

We do not teach formal education so a purely science based program isn't run as often as schools. One of our students favorite activities is a part of our Raptor workshop when we talk about DDT and egg shells. I believe this activity as it stands now is a Structured Inquiry. For this activity we have previously talked about the effects of DDT on eggs of bald eagles. We invite the teens to brainstorm WHAT those effects might be, and eventually they settle on it effecting the egg shell, but to what degree is not known yet. From there we take a fresh egg and place it in a clear rubbemaid bin sandwiched between two Magic Erasers and set another tub on top to apply some pressure to the egg. We ask the students if they think this healthy shell can sustain weight, how much weight, and what the weight threshold might be for a single egg. Next, the students one by one get to come up and place a rock on the bin to apply more pressure to the egg. The question was presented by us educators but the students have to attempt to find a solution and an answer through a procedure that has already been dictated. The science practices that the students learn through all this is dependent on where they take it but we always manage to spend time talking about WHERE are the eagles picking up DDT and what compounds are in DDT that affect the birds enough to produce thinning egg shells that won't make it through incubation. The students talk about the food chain and bimoagnification and pose questions about why it effects raptors more than other birds. In order to bring more inquiry based learnign to this activity I'd like to move in to "guided inquiry" and take away the procedure piece and allow the teens to utilize the resources in the classroom to test the egg shell. Let them experiment with testing the thresholds of eggs. We've only ever tested healthy eggs, I'd also like to pose a question on if they think they can similuate a less healthy, DDT impacted egg. I pose the question, they pose the procedure and the solution. In order to bring more science practices to this activity I would ask them to journal their findings as they create them. Instead of a full class demonstration they could do this in groups and have multiple eggs to experiement with. This gives them the freedom to investigate and test theories.