Science Bus Presidency

Note: Information on my teaching experiences through Science Bus can be found here.

Science Bus had a very informal organization when I began as a volunteer.  After one year, I was elected as president of the organization along with Stephen Connor.  With the help of other tutors we implemented multiple changes to redesign how both the volunteers and elementary school students experienced the afterschool program.  We came up with specific issues and approaches for addressing them while managing over 1000 volunteer hours.

Lesson planning was one of the first issues we needed to address.  Due to the informal structure there were weeks where the lectures were not planned much in advance and it was hard to find enough tutors to teach the lesson.  Last minute e-mails were sent out asking for volunteers.  I created a planning meeting at the beginning of each quarter so that the lessons were planned in advanced and assigned to different head tutors.  This also allowed us to link lessons so that they built off of one another.  Each week, if you were teaching you would come to a lunch meeting where the head tutor for that week would discuss their lesson.  The meetings helped prepare the tutors for the lesson and were an opportunity for giving feedback to the head tutor. 

One of the most effective solutions for impacting lesson planning and organization was a wiki designed by Alex Sugarbaker.  The Science Bus wiki allowed us to organize drivers and tutors on-line for each lesson.  A volunteer could see if additional people were needed for a given week without an excess of e-mails. Importantly, we also started uploading lessons to the wiki for future use.  There’s now a pretty good collection of them. 

Volunteer training and classroom management were a two interlinked issues that needed to be addressed.  New tutors originally just showed up and either adapted or didn’t to the organization.  Some people are naturally good at managing children, but many people need guidance. I designed and taught an orientation to introduce volunteers what to expect.  I also worked with the school to learn their style of classroom management and brought it to science bus.  By using the same management style of the teachers it became easier to manage the students.  This management style was also taught as part of the orientation. Materials for behavior management and the new tutor orientation are included below.

Attendance could also be an issue.  We set up a sticker reward system that was in keeping with strategies already used at this school.  Students were rewarded for good behavior and participation.  This also assisted us with management issues.  We also decided that part of the issue was also making sure that parent’s were aware of what we were doing so that our service was valued.  We held a parents night and brought in a Van de Graaf generator to get both parents and students excited about the service we offered at the East Palo Charter School.  Additionally, we brought back going on field trips with the students to places like the Exploratorium and the San Jose Tech Museum.

Serving as president of Science Bus was my first real leadership position. Many of the changes we implemented that year continued to be in use years after.  I realized how much I enjoyed leadership and began to develop my style of how to approach groups through collaboration.  

Materials for behavior management are here.

New tutor orientation is here.