Activity Title: The vital role of support for MyScience

About:

MyScience is both demanding and rewarding. Here is some good advice for schools and supervisors.

Video 1: How to provide support

Captions:

Music

Teacher: The level of support I've received within the school

has been fantastic, I've got a wonderful supervisor and she

just jumped aboard the MyScience concept and just really taken to it,

she started it last year and she just fell in love with it.

So I've got really great support as far as my supervisor.

Colleagues of mine are also doing the MyScience program with me

so it's been good to have someone else

going through the same experiences.

In fact one of my colleagues is actually first year in MyScience

with me so we're both going through very similar issues

and we're able to talk about things that go wrong which does happen

but a lot of things do go right and we you know get really excited about

sharing some of the things that have gone right with the MyScience.

So, in school I've got heaps of support, principal's you know

very supportive for it, he was the first one

to actually offer it to us as a staff.

Outside of school training for MyScience has been fantastic,

we did a one day training session IBM and it was just brilliant,

it gave us a really good orientation to the whole program,

gave us the fundamental beliefs behind the program

and what they want us to instil in our kids.

And they also gave us great ideas when it came to looking for mentors

and they also did orientation, meetings for mentors

to orientate them to the program.

So, it's not just me passing the information it's actually a lot of time

from outside organisations to help.

So, it's been very, very good.

I think the biggest thing for me was that my

background in Science was limited.

I'm fortunate my fiancee's a scientist so she gave me a lot of pointers.

So, I suppose getting skilled quickly is vital, you need to understand

what you're teaching before you go and teach it.

I found it getting some good resources from other teachers

who have done the program very good, stuff that they've trialed

and proven to work to see if it works.

Perhaps I found it very beneficial to go through my first investigation

with other people not as yourself in one school but also with

someone else on the same grade or someone else in the same stage.

The other alternative to that would probably be if you can get somebody

like a network set up between maybe a high school and a primary school

or just the local school, someone else you can

do it with so you're not alone.

And it's always good to have somebody who's like an executive member

who's also in support of you and willing to give you a bit of time.

So support is humungous, if you don't have that support

it becomes very difficult.

Having previously trained teachers was the best part of the program

because it meant I had someone to go to all the time.

I had someone who told me you know who could guide me along my journey

for my first set of investigations with my kids.

It's also good that my kids when they had issues, if I didn't know

the answer to answer that question I could find that answer out

and come back to them.

So, it was always this really good having this open form of communication

between somebody who has done the program already

and I just found it very beneficial to have that support there,

it made it really a lot easier than it could have been.

In fact I would dread to see the result if I didn't have that support.

Notes:

Support for MyScience comes in many forms.