Megan Nickels, PhD, Assistant Professor of STEM Education, University of Central Florida and Faculty Director of PedsAcademy talks about the program and how it is helping some children.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in May 2019.
I want to talk about the beginning when PedsAcademy was founded. Can you tell me about that, and then what was your role?
NICKELS: Sure. PedsAcademy really feels like the culmination of seven years of my research and work towards providing children with complex medical illness, a rich and meaningful STEM education. So for me that started during my doctoral work at Illinois State University. I had previously been an elementary school teacher for a number of years. And during that time I knew that I wanted to pursue graduate degrees in mathematics education, with mathematics being an area that not only a lot of children struggle with but also a lot of teachers. And, you know, I kind of saw that as my path forward, that I would make that my life’s work in better preparing teachers to teach mathematics, and that that would trickle down to helping children better learn it. But sort of unexpectedly during that program I found myself at the end of the first year being pretty sad that I was no longer in the classroom and not able to be around children. That was a hard adjustment for me to make. So I was looking that first summer for an opportunity in which I could continue in the PhD program but also get to be around kids. And in a summer in Midwestern Illinois or very rural part of Illinois that’s hard to come by. There aren’t the same kind of summer programs that you see in the Central Florida area and some other larger metropolitan areas. So the idea just occurred to me that I’ll go to a children’s hospital. There will be children there. And I really didn’t think a lot more of it than that at the time and I knew that there was a children’s hospital not too far from the university. And I went to their Web site and filled out an application to be a volunteer there and then rather unexpectedly for that as well I got an immediate phone call back because I had listed that I was a certified teacher and they were very eager to have me come in right away. And I thought that’s kind of odd. It’s the summer. I wouldn’t expect that they’re looking for teachers at that time. But to make a very long story short, I started right away in that setting as a teacher, and as a teacher willing and eager to teach mathematics, which was something that they were struggling to find, to provide services for those kids. And on my first day on the job as it were I got sent into a room of a 14 year old girl and she had just had a brain tumor removed the day prior and this was my first encounter with a child in that setting at all. You know, regardless of going in to teach, I had never really thought about the circumstances that surround a child with a critical or complex medical illness. So because of that, that memory is very vivid for me of what that looked like and the chaos that was swirling around that room. But what it was with this young girl and she had a very large family in the room with her – mom, who was Spanish speaking, and a lot of little brothers and sisters. And I’m not a Spanish speaking person. So I was already at a deficit and I couldn’t understand the conversations going on, but there were a lot. You know, it was a buzz of people talking and mom was on the phone with somebody. And the little brothers and sisters had found the world’s noisiest toys that they could play with in the corner. So there were all of these things that were already presenting a challenge to oh, this is going to be hard to engage her in what I need her to do and also hard for me to think about the best teaching practices with a lot of chaos going around. And the TV over her bed was blaring. And she had this C shaped scar around her ear from the surgery the day prior that just looked throbbing and painful. And I’m certain she didn’t feel well. She threw up at one point not long after I was in the room. And then the doctors and nurses came by for rounds, which was even more commotion. All of this unexpected disruption that I hadn’t planned for or known about. And they took her vitals, gave her a shot in her thigh. Then she’s crying and I was standing there with this math packet of worksheets that they had given me, to work with her with and it in that moment it just felt really ridiculous that this was the activity that was going to engage her in mathematics or engage her at all. So I at one point I got enough courage to kind of slide the packet in front of her a little bit and say we’re gonna work on these today. And she just kind of turned a little bit. She didn’t even fully make eye contact. And she said no. So I ran out of the room. I said I was sorry and that same scenario happened all day long. Different worksheet packets, but always worksheet packets, and just really dispassionate responses, understandably from children. Right? So when I left that day, I tried to think about in my own experience what was it that had drawn me to mathematics? And there are lots of things, I suppose. But one thing that I remembered well was a game, computer language actually, but I thought of it as a game that I used to play when I was in second grade and it was the only game that my school had on our little Apple II computer. It was called Logo. I knew enough about Logo to know that it was a language designed to teach mathematics to children through computer programming. On my ride home on that first day I pulled over on the interstate to find out what happened to Logo because I knew that I couldn’t go back with worksheets. That was never going to work out in anyone’s best interest and it clearly wasn’t especially with what I learned from the teacher who was leading that school program at that hospital. She was a lovely woman, but she was in charge of all 200 children in that hospital and just really was sort of the vehicle for passing along those worksheet packets from their home school to their hospital room. My Google search revealed that Logo became Lego-Logo which became the Lego Mindstorms robotics kits. So I went to Toys R Us, bought a robotics kit, went back the next day, same little girl, and said Do you want to make a robot? And she said yes to that. So that was really the start of all of this and how it would evolve into, first, how could I design robotics intervention to teach mathematics, and then that just kept scaling to the point of pitching the idea of a pediatric school program here at Nemours to Dr. Terri Finkel and to Norm eune, and to say I think there’s a better model that we could try in terms of having a in house school program for the children, of course, relying heavily on the robotics work but also the immersive virtual reality work that I had started to dabble with at that time. And then from that initial conversation with Terri and Norm, then all the pieces started to come together. Norm had the idea of bringing in pre service teachers from our college, which is a fabulous idea that has ended up giving us the teaching body population so that we don’t have the one to two hundred ratio or the one to 400 ratio that some children’s hospitals have when they do have school programs. We have a 60 to 100 teacher student ratio.
About how many teachers do you have?
NICKELS: We have 60 different faculty and students who comprise our PedsAcademy body although it fluctuates a little each semester with undergraduate enrollment in our courses. So about 25 UCF faculty who come from all different colleges. We have pediatric specialists, physical therapists, psychologists, content area specialists in mathematics, science, literacy, counselors, exceptional education, marine biologisits, the whole gamut and then we have UCF students from many colleges as well. Our biggest student body comes from the College of Community Innovation and Education, and those are our pre service teachers. So our pre service elementary teachers, secondary, and then lifelong learning majors who may aspire to be child life specialists or social workers from that group. On a given day through the year because we are a twelve month school program we might have a 10 to 15 people working in one area in the hospital. We certainly couldn’t all fit in here in one day. But whether it’s writing curriculum or research which is a big part of our aim as well or directly teaching bedside or here in the classroom, we bring in total 60 people to the table for the 100 children of Nemours.
What are the differences between a program like this and a regular school program in another hospital?
NICKELS: There are a lot of important differences. Of the children’s hospitals that exist in the US that have known school programs, and certainly there are probably some that we’re not aware of, but they all mostly follow a common model in which they’ll have a single teacher, usually employed by the district in which the hospital sits. And that single teacher is then responsible for the education of whether it’s 100 bed hospital all the way up to a 400 bed hospital. St. Jude is an exception with 6-10 teachers I believe. So the way in which they have to operate under that model is they’ll rely on a volunteer sort of pool of individuals in order to take the student work that gets sent over from the child’s school of record to the classrooms, which was the model that I became familiar with when I first was volunteering. In that model, those volunteers come from all walks of life, but are very rarely ever certified teachers. So a lot of times they’re very well-meaning, good people, trying to do good work by children, but they often might lack the content knowledge or the pedagogical knowledge to teach subjects, especially STEM subjects. And the teaching that they are able to do even when they might be well prepared to do it are the types of activities that you would likely see in a regular brick and mortar school. And I really feel very strongly that the kinds of tasks that happen in brick and mortar schools, they may well be wonderful tasks, but children with complex medical illness have such a unique set of circumstances surrounding their education and just their holistic care that I think the idea that we give them work that’s for the healthy typically developing child is ludicrous when we can give them research backed educational opportunities that address their health needs and their educational needs in regards to neurocognitive and conceptual learning of content and their social emotional needs. And to do any less is really a social injustice.
So is there an evaluation process of how you tailor the teaching to the needs of each kid?
NICKELS: Yes. We do a lot. When we see a child for the first time, we do a reading and a mathematics baseline assessment in a very playful way. We’re not using a paper and pencil test to find out what we know. We have a structure in place to gain a quick snapshot of not only what they know in regards to reading and mathematics and sometimes you catch some other things along the wayyou know, depending on that assessment activity might look like you might learn something more about science or social studies or what not. But we also take that opportunity to learn about their interests so that we can give what Dr. Finkel would call precision education for that child. So it’s making sure that it addresses their content needs and also, their social emotional need for that and health and wellness if we’re able to do an activity with that. Along the way as we lesson plan specifically for that child. We also teach our pre service teacher population who does a lot of the teaching alongside the faculty, how to design lessons for this population. We actually have redesigned their courses that they take here onsite at the hospital to be specific to teaching this population.
If you wouldn’t mind also giving me specific examples of a condition that you change the teachings. I think I read something about difficulty focusing. How do you work around that?
NICKELS: Courses are redesigned so that our pre service teachers can understand the medical condition of the child and understand what accommodations need to happen in lesson planning and in teaching so that they’re addressing those needs as well. So for example, a child with cancer – and I’m sort of speak broadly to cancers as a group here – we know that from common treatments with cancers, drugs like methotrexate that they receive, have an effect on working memory and visual spatial and motor perception. So the robotics work is really applicable for them in addressing those needs because it’s very iterative when you’re building a robot and you’re programming it in code, whatever the language is, if it’s Python or if it’s a graphical language or what not, the structure of doing so requires that there’s first a physical response to the robot, whereas if the child wanst to make a decision about the robot’s behavior in code and then they have to touch that so the one to one correspondence that can help with that motor perception and the visual spatial, and then the highly iterative process of doing everything in sort of small chunks, which is a cognitive therapy element to help address some of the working memory needs. That may not be the cleanest example, but that’s an example for you of that.
Could you just list the subjects that are taught?
NICKELS: Sure. Mathematics, science, engineering, literacy and so that ranges from phonics for very young children all the way to teen book clubs and what not, social studies, art, music. I’m thinking if I missed anything. Well computer science sort of naturally through the robotics.
When children are in hospitals, they can get held back a lot even if they have their homework from school.
NICKELS: Sure they can be held back just based on the amount of days of school that they miss. There’s a threshold that whatever your circumstances are in terms of your grade level, once you’ve missed that number of days, you’re held back in grade regardless which is truly unfortunate. But through the research that I’ve done with the robotics we know that with a six month sustained intervention of robotics that a child can be at grade level and then a year advanced for mathematical content knowledge. So our aim isn’t just that we put them back in their schools and they’re where they should be, but that they’re actually above grade level and that they’ve had extraordinary experiences while they’re here.
Are there other hospitals that are looking to mirror this?
NICKELS: Yes. We’ve had a lot of communication with several hospitals who are really interested in what we’re doing with PedsAcademy and interested in being able to have a PedsAcademy of their own at their site. And so we’re working with those groups to help them do that.
Can you talk through a little bit some of the cool features that you have in this room?
NICKELS: Yes, we have a 3D printer which is as you can imagine a really big hit with the kids. And so with 3D printing what we’re really talking about is mathematical modelling and engineering. So lots of mathematical concepts that come together to be able to design and create an object. So we’ll use Google sketch up or Tinker CAD or AutoCAD to do sort of the heavy work. And by we I mean the children because we’re very focused on having them be the engineers that design whatever it is that they’re looking to do. And then the 3D printer of course is the conduit for creating that object for them that they have done, you know, the digital sketch of. So that encompasses a wide variety of curricular topics as well. With August, for example, who is very into social studies and so 3D printing for her grabs those other content areas, but provides the mechanism by which she can do the things that she’s looking to do for social studies. Do you want me to go into robotics or anything else? I’m sure Neil will talk a lot about his robots. But yeah, I mean, for us the robotics are the biggest piece of our curriculum and we use a range of different educational robotics because of different needs, but always the driving force there is the mathematical learning and understanding that is necessary to program the robot, and in some cases to build it as well.
Our focus on STEM is very intentional. So of course literacy is foundational and it’s extremely important, but STEM content is very demanding not only of the teachers having you know the background and the content knowledge but you know STEM fields are gateways for living the lives that we choose for ourselves and that can better our own lives in our communities. So we want to make sure that children just because they’re in the hospital aren’t in any way missing out on getting that rich content delivered to them in a way that’s meaningful and can also address their more holistic needs.
Is there any cost for the families?
NICKELS: No. There’s no cost for families.
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you would want people to know?NICKELS: Yeah. I think one question that I maybe didn’t finish answering all the way when you asked how we’re different from other hospital school programs because I’m long winded, but it’s not only that we have broken the model on that teacher student ratio, but it’s also because the curriculum that we deliver to our children is specific to their disease or condition. We are the world’s first pediatric school program to do that. And we have our in-house curriculum that provides those necessary accommodations and elements of therapy whether it’s neurocognitive or physical or what not to do that for our children. And then what also makes us different is that we continue in that research vein of learning about conditions that haven’t been well studied and making sure that we understand what their educational needs are not only so that we can inform our own practice here with PedsAcademy, but so that we can inform teachers and schools when they have a child come into their classroom that has a complex medical illness, that we can provide the training and the tools to say here’s what you can do for this child in your setting.
END OF INTERVIEW
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