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The Professional Development Program (PDP) was a highly impactful and innovative program that was run by the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators for twenty years, from 2001–2020. The program trained early-career scientists and engineers to teach effectively and inclusively, while also developing participants’ skills in leadership, collaboration, and teamwork. In this paper, we summarize important aspects of the PDP and some of the program’s major outcomes, describe legacies of the program, and share recommendations based on two decades of experience. A large section of this paper details aspects of the PDP that we consider essential to the program but that might not be apparent from other documentation of the program. Recommendations for others interested in professional development of STEM graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are: 1) invest in establishing program culture; 2) prepare participants pursuing all STEM career paths for inclusive teaching; 3) focus on teaching and learning authentic STEM practices of participants’ fields; 4) provide authentic and challenging contexts for practicing professional skills; 5) model all aspects of what participants are expected to do; and 6) provide opportunities for growth and becoming a collaborator within the community. 

The Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE) Professional Development Program (PDP) has led to the generation of several activities geared toward training in astronomical instrumentation. These include activities developed for the Center for Adaptive Optics summer school and the AstroTech Instrumentation Summer School. The goal of these activities has been to provide the participants with hands-on experience to convey challenging concepts in instrumentation. The inclusion of practices from PDP led to activities that prioritized inquiry-based approaches over the more traditional formulaic lab-based training and activities. Our panel will review the design of these activities and discuss approaches that increase the likelihood of achieving the learning goals. We will also discuss ways in which these activities can help encourage students with little previous experience in instrumentation to consider additional studies in instrumentation. Finally, we will reflect on the importance of facilitators for these activities and the role PDP plays in training facilitators. 

In addition to educating participants about inquiry instruction, equity and inclusion in STEM, and assessment, the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators’ (ISEE’s) Professional Development Program (PDP) is intentionally designed to provide opportunities for participants to return in subsequent years to observe (shadow), practice, and train in a variety of roles (e.g., design team leader, discussion group leader, apprentice facilitator, apprentice instructor). Returning participants not only receive instruction to guide them in these roles, but also receive feedback from core team designers and experienced facilitators and instructors while conducting and after performing these roles. Panelists will discuss one or more roles they engaged in as a PDP participant and how these experiences shaped their approaches to learning, teaching, and working with others as part of their professional careers. Topics to be covered will include leadership, facilitating dialogues and group discussions, the process of active listening, and the intentional design of ideas around diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

In many organizations (e.g., higher education, non-profits, small companies), individuals are called upon to lead small groups of people to complete one or more tasks both in formal roles and in informal settings. For example, department heads, committee chairs, project leads, and program managers are all roles that require an individual to utilize leadership skills to lead their team to the successful completion of the tasks at hand. However, in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and their associated jobs, training and support in leadership development are often lacking. To meet this need, the Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE) at the University of California - Santa Cruz (UCSC) made supporting and mentoring leadership development a key component of the Professional Development Program (PDP) for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in STEM, which ran for over 20 years. Building off of the ISEE leadership development model (ISEE 2020), this workshop is designed to give professionals an opportunity to learn about and practice important leadership skills that can be used in their organizations. In this workshop, participants learn to apply three elements of effective leadership that are useful in practice and inclusive of multiple perspectives on leadership. Participants apply actionable leadership practices to their own challenges at work and develop the language to discuss their own leadership skills. Workshop duration: 15 minutes individual reading, 2 hours in-person workshop, 15 minutes follow up. 

The role of facilitator, and facilitation strategies, are components that sometimes get overlooked as important in promoting collaborative interactions, such as with group work. Being able to work effectively in a group is a required skill for most disciplines, in particular for those in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. It is also central throughout the Professional Development Program (PDP) developed and run by the Institute of Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE), starting with group formation and leading all the way up to the final culminating activity. As such, PDP teams are taught facilitation strategies. Keeping in mind a group’s goals and what their measures for accountability are, the facilitator should be able to give constructive feedback and actively assess the team’s progress on the go. In this process, the facilitator can identify early on issues that can then be addressed before they become pathological. In this paper, we discuss from our experience as PDP participants and facilitators, what are different spaces we have applied facilitation strategies, what are some of the strategies that have worked throughout the years to improve group work, and what observations from the group help us make the best possible assessment. 

Here we discuss the design and implementation of an introductory DNA Barcoding module that we developed for the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Science in Action Program, a two-week summer program that teaches high school students about Hawai‘i’s biodiversity. Students used the concept of characterization to explain the relationships among organisms using morphological, ecological, and molecular data. Additionally, students gained experience in the scientific practice of generating explanations by gathering multiple lines of evidence to support or refute a claim, linking claims with evidence, and presenting such claims in written and oral formats to identify unknown algae samples. During this activity, students also gained real-world research experience in the field of biodiversity research. We also discuss potential modifications for future iterations of this module. 

The Akamai Internship in Hawai‘i and the Professional Development Program (PDP) address key issues of sustaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive STEM workforce in industry and academia. Established in 2002, the Akamai program builds capacity to overcome the brain-drain workforce problem that Hawaiʻi faces by connecting local undergraduate students with internship opportunities in the STEM industries on the islands of Maui and Hawaiʻi. The PDP provides opportunities for graduate students, early-career scientists and industry leaders to learn effective andragogical practices for teaching science and engineering to the next generation at the undergraduate level. A unique, grounding aspect of the Akamai program across all cohorts is a week-long course preparing interns to work with their local industry partners and build an inclusive community. The course is co-led by Akamai program staff and PDP alumni in collaboration with PDP design teams who run complementary inquiry learning activities. Since the first cohort of 2003, 451 interns and around 100 design team members have participated in Akamai. Of the 451 interns who participated in the Akamai program, at least 8 participants have become PDP design team members. The purpose of this panel discussion is to feature four of those alumni that participated in both Akamai and PDP programs. The panelists will share the factors that influenced them to become a PDP instructor as well as highlight the impacts that both programs had in shaping their respective life and career pathways. 

It seems intuitive that effective learning experiences in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) should be inclusive and should mirror authentic STEM as practiced by professionals. However, it is less intuitive what an authentic, inclusive STEM learning experience (AISLE) should look like or include. Over the course of 20 years, the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) has grappled with this question, developing and refining a framework of six key elements of authentic and inclusive STEM learning experiences. Here, we present this framework, which grew from an exploration of what “scientific inquiry” means in the context of teaching and learning, and expanded to include practices and norms that are valued in engineering fields. ISEE’s framework is the cornerstone of its Professional Development Program (PDP), which trained early-career science and engineering professionals to teach STEM effectively, primarily at the college level, from 2001-2020. In addition to presenting the six elements of this framework, we describe how PDP participants implemented the elements, and we provide recommendations for putting the elements into practice through the design, teaching and assessment of STEM learning experiences. 

We designed, facilitated, and re-designed an inquiry activity in an introductory undergraduate astronomy research methods course at the University of Texas at Austin over two different semesters. The teaching venue for this inquiry activity took place in the course “AST 376R: A Practical Introduction to Research Methods”, the inquiry activity was inserted into an existing course structure, taking place over multiple class periods. We discuss how we were able to leverage the Professional Development Program (PDP) inquiry themes and introduce students to specific STEM practices, using this experience as a primer or mini version of a larger research activity and research experience that they would determine and lead themselves later on in the semester. In this paper we describe the benefits for students in this course and the lessons learned by the instructors. 

Research suggests that developing an identity as a person in STEM is necessary for learners from marginalized groups to persist in STEM education and careers. These learners may perceive that their race, gender, or other characteristics make it difficult for their peers and supervisors to recognize them as scientists or engineers, thus disrupting their ability to maintain successful degree progress and to pursue their STEM career aspirations. Here we discuss the specific ways we designed inquiry workshops to not only clarify difficult core STEM content, but to also promote learners’ competence, performance, and targeted recognition as scientists. Our workshops were designed for students interested in chemistry, climate science, physics, and toxicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), Workshops for Engineering & Science Transfers (WEST) 2019 program. In designing our workshops, we focused on promoting the scientific identities of our learners by incorporating authentic ways for students to receive recognition from both peers and instructional facilitators, as well as allowing students to tap into their own personal interests and values. Insights from our designed assessments for learners’ understanding of our content demonstrate the success of our initiatives and provide further areas of improvement. Our goals are to create inclusive workshops to support students from all backgrounds, with emphasis on underrepresented backgrounds (community college, first generation, students of color, women, and LGBTQ+ students, etc.) as well as support them in other contexts, such as when mentoring STEM students in academic laboratory settings.