PEN partners with the Ghana Association of Science Teachers (GAST) to organize and facilitate the trainings. In the introductory workshop, teachers are trained on more than 10 activities for the upcoming term’s topics. Teachers learn hands-on activities that complement the national curriculum and use locally available materials. Currently based in Ghana, PEN hosts workshops that build teacher capacity to use and design effective learning experiences. The Practical Education Network (PEN) empowers K12 STEM teachers in material resource constrained environments to engage their students in hands-on learning. The solution: The Practical Education Network Eighty percent of the teachers we surveyed cite this lack of resources as constraining their ability to facilitate engaging, lasting learning experiences for their students. However, less than 10 percent of the 6,000 junior high schools in Ghana contain any laboratory equipment, and similar resource constraints exist in the 10 million schools in Africa. She has worked with hundreds of students and teachers from Boston to Ghana to Peru.ĭecades of pedagogical research point to hands-on activities being essential to both increase student engagement as well as to effectively transfer real understanding. Since graduating in 2015, Heather has been leading PEN in their pursuit of scaling experiential learning in resource-limited settings. They won numerous competitions including the MIT Sloan Africa Innovate Business Plan Competition (2015), IEEE/IBM SmarterPlanet Challenge, 1st Place Curriculum (2012), and the MIT Global Challenge/IDEAS Competition (2011). While at MIT, she began developing the Practical Education Network (PEN) with a team of fellow students and others. At D-Lab, she co-founded and co-instructed D-Lab: Education in addition to mentoring students from other D-Lab classes. During her time in graduate school and at D-Lab, she developed a passion for STEM education and indigenous innovation. Heather holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. International Development Design Summits.Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
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