Penn State, area school district partner to equip teachers to teach engineering

The success of PERSIST led to a second grant of nearly a half million dollars from the Pennsylvania Department of Education from a program called PA SMART: Network of Elementary Engineering Educators. This project, nicknamed “NE3,” was a collaboration between CSATS and the Youth Engineering Solutions program.

Inspired by the success POASD experienced with PERSIST, NE3 was designed to prepare 60 teacher educators from across Pennsylvania to hold engineering workshops in their regions and provide them with curricular materials to create a lending library for teachers in schools without access or money to purchase curricular kits.

In that program, educators from POASD who had participated in PERSIST volunteered to become teacher leaders in their schools, leading to all K-5 teachers in the district being successfully trained on how to teach engineering to their students.

“I have had an amazing experience with the PERSIST and NE3 programs,” said Ashlea Cowher, a fourth-grade teacher, one of the lead teachers in PERSIST, and one of the teachers to provide training to her colleagues. “I was able to attend conferences and trainings that were not previously available to me. I gained valuable information from these opportunities and have employed a large amount of it in my classroom. I’ve also been able to provide professional development to my coworkers, which is something I really enjoy doing. My school and students have also benefited from the PERSIST program. By piloting this program, our district was better prepared for the transition to the STEELS standards. The kits provided us with an opportunity to implement engineering lessons, which our previous kits were missing.”

The partnership has undoubtedly made a tangible positive impact on POASD, said Johnson, who is quick to point out that the bulk of the credit belongs not to him, but to the people in the school district who took the opportunity and made the most of it.

“Collaboration is a two-way street.” Johnson said. “They weren’t required to collaborate with Penn State. But they thought it was worth doing. They trusted me, and then when they used it, they liked the experience. 

“At the end of the day the change came from within,” he added. “I helped a couple of teachers learn how to teach engineering. But then they went back and taught everyone else how to do it. The buy-in came because the other teachers saw the success Bethany, Ashlea, Chera and Ashton were having. I think that’s a better way to allow for progress in education than telling schools, ‘you have to do this.’”