General Tips

• For the Plants Get Sick, Too! module, be sure to do a test run before showing it to the students. You may want to consider recording a video showing them how to do it.
• Start preparing for the session at least 2 weeks before you plan to have students online. Depending on the module or investigation theme you plan to use, there may be varying amounts of setup times. For example, the Brassica and Arabidopsis modules require specific growth chambers, which might take some time to put together.
• Plan for a location where students can pick up materials once their “wish lists” are complete. We send all materials for most of the modules (seeds, syringes, or spores) to you, the teacher, so you will need to consider or coordinate where students can pick them up, or whether you want to drop them off at students’ homes.
• Send students outside to explore their environment, their relationship to their environment, and plants' roles in their local ecosystem.
• Break down the module to create smaller chunks for assignments to reduce the likelihood of overwhelming students.

Communication

• Use your mentors; be sure to keep them updated on what your students are doing and what your goals are.
• Create scaffolds for your students to use as a way to respond to mentors. Sometimes students struggle with how to communicate with their mentors, and a little guidance can go a long way. For example, some teachers give students a list to use to introduce themselves to their mentors (e.g., “My name is…; My hobbies are…”), which helps them get over the hump of introducing themselves to someone new online.
• The foundation of PlantingScience is to allow students to communicate with real plant scientist mentors. As such, there is a back-and-forth, asynchronous conversation between students and mentors. During remote learning, this can be difficult with internet access issues, or other challenges. In the past, teachers have occasionally posted on their students’ behalf so the mentors are not left wondering what is going on and whether the students have disappeared completely.

Timing Tips

Start early. Each module has a recommended timeline for introducing materials to the students, getting them online, etc. Be sure to read through the teacher’s guide for your selected module to have enough time to prepare for getting the students online. If you are new to PlantingScience, leave yourself an extra week to prepare, if possible, to

• carefully select teams,
• gather necessary supplies,
• create a rubric for grading (you can also check in with experienced teachers for suggestions on these ideas in the PlantingScience Teacher’s group),
• understand the materials to present to students,
• introduce yourself to your liaison and work together to assign mentors to all of your teams, and
• create a list of potential materials students may request for their projects.

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Suggested Themes

Teachers recommend the following modules during remote learning:

• Wonder of Seeds
• Agronomy Feeds the World
• Celery Challenge
• Where Does Pollen Come From?
• Power of Sunlight
• Plants Get Sick, Too!
• Tree-mendous Benefits of Trees (NEW!)
• Corn Competition (but this does not require mentors, as it is an introductory module)

Investigation Themes

Team Tips

• Students work in teams of 3-5, so you may need to consider group dynamics and how well students work together – in-person or remotely. Emphasize to the students that they get to do hands-on activities while communicating with real, live scientists.
• Consider assigning Pogli roles – manager, recorder, data analyst, etc. – to encourage accountability within teams.
• Alternatively, students could work individually on projects at home, as long as the class size is not larger than about 20 students.
• For hybrid systems, you may consider setting up the experiments in the classroom, but this might require that you, the teacher, monitor/maintain the projects and/or record data for each team. This will vary depending on how often students are in the classroom and whether schools are closed suddenly.
• Consider using peer grading to hold students accountable as well.

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