GAM 2018 Blog

AWB’s Building on the Eclipse Program Inspires Americans to Continue Learning About Light

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Apr 18

2018

by Tilly Evans

Published: Wednesday, April 18 2018 09:00

By Lindsay Bartolone

Building on the excitement of the Total Solar Eclipse in the summer of 2017, AWB’s US based education program, invited educators from all settings to participate in a series of lessons, professional development workshops and culminating events. These experiences helped them explore and learn from light alongside students of all ages.

AWB was aware of many groups helping to prepare for the eclipse, so we looked for areas to build upon existing resources. These areas included building an online platform where resources including lesson plans and professional development webinars were linked, searchable and curated. AWB provided glasses where needed. We designed a crowdfunding platform to help groups (without the funding to purchase glasses) raise the needed support in their communities. We offered a way to connect educators with amateur and professional astronomers to form partnerships for the eclipse and beyond.

We also provided Professional Development and support after the eclipse. We chose to organize the resources and final projects about learning from light. This allowed us to tie together the natural phenomenon of the eclipse with broader topics interesting to clubs and nature centers while supporting educational standards across the country. We wanted to be able to appeal to many groups, while meeting the needs of the educators who had already begun to register for the program. We set goals to reach underserved communities and provide quality resources to any interested educator.

One of those resources was the foldable spectroscope previously designed and distributed by Stanford Solar Center. Many members of our team had used these with our educator and student communities and knew what a useful tool they could be to explore light. As a part of this project, AWB can now provide these spectroscopes for a discounted price and has crowd-funding templates to assist educators in providing these to their students.

We provided descriptions of culminating projects and events to motivate the investigations for students and other groups. However, we remained open to educator choices for these projects. We intended for teachers and students to share the results of these projects through online presentations with each other and we plan to invite notable guests to provide feedback.
We had 220 educators complete registration forms, the majority of whom were formal educators. They came from all over the country and estimated they would use the resources compiled by AWB with large audiences (See chart)

There is a high proportion of underserved schools represented in the program as measured by the percentage of students on free or reduced-price lunch programs. The median percentage of students enrolled in free and reduced lunch is 70%, and one quarter of the schools have 90% or more in these programs. 83% of the educators told us that school would be in session during the eclipse and 99% of them were participating in an AWB program for the first time.

One educator said the program was useful because it was a "one stop shop" of resources” and (s)he enjoyed "knowing I could come ask questions of fellow science teachers and space science experts.” We were encouraged to "keep the resources available. I plan to come back”
It isn’t too late to join our community. Educators are welcome to register and join in on learning from light using the eclipse as inspiration. (Link to reg form https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HMDNHDW)

Lindsay Bartolone is a Science Education Consultant from Chicago IL. She has been a Co-I on NASA's Science Education and Public Outreach Forum projects in the areas of Astrophysics and Heliophysics. She has led Education and Public Outreach Programs for NASA missions including Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). She has also served as Director of Education at Adler Planetarium.