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Traditional professional development for informal educators often relies on brief, lecture-based sessions that reinforce familiar teaching practices. In collaboration with 27 informal learning organizations across four years, we attended to the need for authentic, long-term professional development through the co-adaptation and co-refinement of a reflective video-based cycle. This focus on supporting informal educators to productively attend, interpret, and respond to youths’ experiences with failure while engaged in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related activities. This paper describes how and why organizations co-adapted components of the professional development failure cycle to support the operational constraints of their organizations while addressing the specific needs of their informal educators. Co-adaptations addressed the following: (a) educators’ discomfort and vulnerabilities, (b) time constraints, (c) staff turnover, and (d) lack of tools. These adaptations refined the development of a reflective video-based professional development framework that informal STEM institutions can adopt to equip educators with strategies and build a supportive community, helping youths navigate and learn from failure. 

Museums offer a unique role and safe space in shaping how youth view and react to experiences with failure. The purpose of this study was to add to the conversation around failure in out‐of‐school learning, particularly from the perspective of educators within museum settings that implement STEAM‐related making exhibits, workshops, and/or camps for youth. We analyzed approximately 9 h of video data from two sources: video recordings of virtual group meetings with 14 museum educators from six partnering institutions, and video recordings from five of the individual partnering sites discussing failure as a concept within their organization and programming. In this article, we demonstrate how the framings of failure by museum educators are bounded, and transformed, by un/seen external forces that ultimately impact the professional practices of educators in their organizations. We contend that the significance of this study lies in how perspectives around failure are produced and how they influence educators' professional practice, specifically in how failure is framed and communicated within STEAM‐related learning opportunities in museum settings. 

Museum educators play a major role in how visitors’ experience failure moments during STEM-related activities. The purpose of this study was to explore how museum educators co-constructed iteration through failure moments with visitors during an engineering activity. Utilizing an instrumental case study, we analyzed video data and one-on-one reflective meetings from five museum educators. Through our analysis, we highlight how educators and visitors are able to jointly attend, interpret, and respond to failures that leads to continuous improvements of the prototype and/or design process (i.e., iteration). The significance of this study lies in providing informal educators with approaches they can incorporate to support visitors during the failure-learning process, namely, strategies that develop visitors’ noticing skills around failure. 

In this manuscript, we describe a coding club we created and implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were purposeful in creating the club to: (a) focus on design and problem solving as the basis for learning computer coding and (b) include elements to improve the engagement of girls. We ran multiple iterations of a Girls Design with Code Club that involved over 100 girls from 22 countries. We reviewed various sources of data to evaluate how our design and implementation of the coding clubs impacted the girls who participated. In an effort to share our learnings with other researchers and program providers, we share evidence of choices that we believe had positive impacts and others that we can improve in future iterations. 

Abstract Engineering outreach programs often portray outreach educators as role models for youth. It is widely believed that introducing youth, especially girls, to potential engineering role models will broaden participation in engineering majors and careers. Based on interviews with and surveys of fourth- and fifth-grade girls participating in an engineering outreach program, we question whether youth are looking for career role models, and we challenge the assumption that youth will take up an adult as a role model simply because the adult is presented as such. We question what role these ‘‘models’’ play in the minds and lives of youth and argue that it may differ from what we expect. To be clear, we are not arguing that engineering role models are not important or not influential. Rather, we think it is important to gain a better understanding of how youth, particularly girls, view these potential engineering role models, which will allow us to optimize the significance of these adults to the youth participating in engineering outreach.