Few elements of our culture are as firmly established in the 21st century western zeitgeist as the fact that teachers are underappreciated and poorly paid. That goes double for informal educators — those who work outside the confines of diploma or degree-granting institutions. In the realm of science, informal educators can be found at museums, zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, planetariums and other science centers. Many of them work part time or volunteer, and the rate of turnover is high.
When Megan Ennes was an educator at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher, she noticed something else about her colleagues. They lacked a standardized system of evaluation that would enable them to gauge how well they were doing and identify gaps where they could improve.
When Ennes left her job and enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she made this issue one of the primary focal points of her work.
"This is something I care about deeply as a former museum educator. Being able to support the professional growth of folks in the field is vital to my research, and it's why I wanted to make something museums could use to help their education staff," Ennes said.
After a decade of research and several studies published on the subject, Ennes recently rolled out a free self-efficacy survey that she hopes will make it easier for science centers of all stripes to connect their educators with the resources they need to thrive.
"There is often very little time or money for museums to send their educators off to things like professional development workshops. What we need is a way for everyone on a team to easily determine which areas they feel less skilled in because that would clearly be the place we'd want to invest limited time and money."
The survey is based on evaluation criteria designed for formal K-12 educators but with added modifications that account for the unique challenges faced by informal educators. Teachers in the latter group, for example, typically have a smaller range of things they need to teach, but their audiences have much broader demographics, with a particularly notable discrepancy in age. The things they teach must be interesting enough to hold the turbulent attention span of a 5-year-old while simultaneously satisfying the curiosity of a well-educated adult, all without sacrificing accuracy. This makes pedagogy — the science and strategic practice of teaching — especially important for informal educators.
On top of that, there may be only one or a handful of educators employed at a given science center, which leaves fewer opportunities for them to compare notes with colleagues than exist in K-12 schools.
Another crucial difference is feedback. Informal educators get less of it because their audiences are hyper transient. While K-12 teachers might work with the same cohort of students for a semester or a year, museum tour guides work with audiences that change by the hour, thereby reducing the extent to which visitors can provide meaningful insight into the quality of a lesson's content and the way it was delivered.
Feedback from management is scarce as well. Schools operate with the core goal of transmitting knowledge to their pupils and thus ideally have a well-defined structure and system of review to ensure this is carried out effectively. But science centers are more varied and chimeric, operating under the need to balance education, research, curation, the maintenance of operational facilities, exhibit design and fabrication, and — in the case of zoos and aquariums — the care and well-being of their non-human inhabitants.
"Evaluation doesn't happen as often in museum education, mostly because of a lack of time and people who are qualified to do that kind of work," Ennes said.
Ennes reasoned that the best way to deal with this lack of infrastructure was not to go about erecting walls and spreading plaster. The building material needed for construction didn't exist. Rather, it was more a matter of equipping educators with the means to objectively assess their own ability.
"If we can highlight the areas where we need more support, then we can identify existing professional development opportunities that align with these needs."
So, working with Bikram Karmakar, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ennes took nine widely used measurements of pedagogical success and used them to construct a survey with 51 questions. As a test case, she sent this to informal educators throughout the United States and used a factor analysis to group their responses into categories, similar to the way in which a Myers-Briggs test uses a person's responses to suggest a personality type.
"The hope is that this makes it a more effective tool, rather than having to go through all of the questions individually and trying to figure out where there's overlap."
The authors published the results of their survey distribution in the journal Research in Science Education.
