Looking back at my internship experience thus far, I am reminded of the apprehensions, excitements, successes and failures.

That’s really my favorite take away. Experiencing failure in a place that was safe and supportive. It’s also the biggest lesson I learned as an emerging scientist. Science is about striving for success and failing over and over.

When we were trying to come up with a stable, repeatable process for studying ant behavior in an uninfluenced, natural manner, we failed multiple times.

We had to devise a study chamber because the ants seemed to be reacting to outside stimuli during our initial observations. We experimented with a variety of boxes, platforms, lighting and recording devices until we succeeded in getting everything just right. Dr. Beasley was instrumental in allowing us to invent the  science we needed to solve a problem. She gave us the freedom to think through the problem while providing honest, critical feedback.

This is the climate I intend on creating for my students. Students should be encouraged to develop their own science in order to solve  problems. Then they should be allowed to fail repeatedly with guidance and support in order to attain their goals. This is real-world science and teaching at its finest.

Thank you Dr. Beasley for giving us the tools to fail our way to success. My students will be impacted by your model of teaching.

After the incredible externship experience, it’s nice to be able to catch my breath for a moment. The real challenge comes next. How do we take the energy, passion and curiosity from the lab to the classroom. As we were developing our mission statement for our team website, Kelly Wall said she wanted to  ignite her student’ curiosity. That is what we set out to do with our lesson plans.

The first step was to figure out how to bring the lab experience into the classroom. To do that we first needed to find ways of making the equipment we were using  accessible to any teacher. We constructed an ant behavior study chamber out of cardboard and wrapping paper. We used a similar technique to make a light box for photographing specimens. Extending the cost effectiveness and availability even further, we were able to use many items purchased at a dollar store to replace expensive consumables.

Additionally, we faced the challenge of how to chunk the overall scientific study into  stand alone lessons that still contribute to citizen science.

As we work on our lessons we continually reflect on this. Thankfully our mentor has been very flexible and open to getting this science in the classroom. In fact, that is the silver lining to our struggles. Our Postdoc has been instrumental in helping us craft accessible lab experiments while still adding to her research. Although the hardest part of this experience is ahead, we are excited to be entering phase that will allow us to make our students feel like the scientists we have become.

There are countless aspects of the Kenan Fellows externship I love. Among them is the planning Dr Beasely and our team are doing to put real-world science in the hands of our students.

Developing plans that are teacher friendly and exciting to our students, based on our mentor’s research study is somewhat challenging. It is forcing us to rethink the our roles as teachers to become scientists and facilitators.

We are boiling down our lab experiences to make them feasible and accessible for middle school teachers and students everywhere. One of the contretemps we face is the need to explore alternative methods and resources  that will reduce the cost of our data collection experiments. We’re getting good at improvising and adapting, another unexpected benefit of this experience.

As we continue to work through the classroom adaptations we are guided by the question of how these experiences could be used to complement the overall study as it progresses. The answer, of course, is to lead students to collect relevant and useful observations that can be collected over time in a variety of locations. We are ambitious but we also believe we can teach students lab protocols and observation skills that Dr. Beasely can add to her collective analysis. As we construct our lesson plans, I can easily imagine our students becoming scientists involved with state-wide data collection.

Our ultimate goal, however, seems even more ambitious. Once we can perfect and package our plans this study could go far beyond our state. With the dedicated collaboration of our team I envision a day when we could take this world-wide. Only then can we hope to create true global citizens of science.

During my first week in the lab, I experienced several game-changing moments in my understanding of real-world science. Thanks to the incredible people I have been working with, all the stereotypes and preconceptions of working in a research lab have been shattered. Instead of an institutional and clinical environment, I have found an organic and supportive place to try new things, fail, and problem-solve my way through unpredictable obstacles. Additionally, working in the fishbowl lab has reminded my just how exciting and approachable science can be. Several times I have looked up and seen parents and kids staring with wide-eyed curiosity as we were working. I was often so caught up in their interest that I ran out of the lab with a colony of ants, sat in the floor and was surrounded by kids that wanted to learn about what we were doing.

These experiences have driven me to recreate this experience in the classroom. I have been working to find ways of making the science we do accessible to other teachers and students, This week I am reminded of just how much we can learn when we are engaged and and excited about something. I have learned so much more about our project and the science behind it by living it rather than memorizing and testing. Also, the critical-thinking and problem solving aspect can not be overlooked. Working collectively, we were able to identify problems with our experiments and think our way through them. This kind of  collaboration and commitment only happens when people are driven and inspired to do their best work. Our students deserve that same kind of motivation and support.

Already this internship has reshaped my views on education. I always knew what seemed to work best for my kids but it has been extremely validating to see how effective problem-based, real-world experiences are in engaging and encouraging learners. My mentor and teammates are working hard to connect our research to school content and to find alternative resources to make our experiments accessible to all students and teachers. As we have become scientists our mentor has become a teacher. We share a common vision and a common goal of getting our science into classrooms world wide. It’s a lofty goal, I know, but nobody ever did anything great without thinking big.