What is a Community of Practice?

Our community of practice is set up to include four 90-minute sessions over six weeks where we dive into a different topic each session.  They are hands-on, interactive experiences where out-of-school time educators learn together.  Everyone participates via Zoom, so you get to connect with educators from across the county.

The community of practice introduces participants to the Practices for an Engineering Mindset, as well as learning activities and teaching practices to support youth in hands-on engineering. It is a unique learning experience where we try to bring together the benefits of virtual training – like building a national network, joining from you own space, and not requiring any travel – with the benefits of in-person training – like discussing ideas with colleagues and learning from them and doing hands-on engineering activities – and our own Click2Engineering elements – like experienced informal educators who facilitate the CoP, and great videos of youth in lots of different informal learning environments engaging in engineering.

Each session builds on the previous experiences and will include opportunities to engage in engineering activities with other participants, facilitators and leaders in engineering education.  But don’t worry if you aren’t able to make it to all of them – that always happens.  We can fill you in on what you missed but we don’t make recordings.