Growing Great, a non-profit empowering children to make healthy food choices. The garden and nutrition education programs focus on literacy and scientific inquiry.
In collaboration with Growing Great, we designed, produced and deployed the online Growing Great Docent Training courses. The classroom sessions are conducted by volunteer docents. The Training comprises video lessons, printed materials, testing, and evaluations, all available online. After acceptance to the program, Docents begin at DOCENT CENTRAL, where they can access the materials they need to begin training: the process, the lessons, classroom prep and tools and techniques. Also any news about the program, their school or Growing Great events is posted at DOCENT CENTRAL. In addition, we provided a LESSON INDEX, RESOURCE LIBRARY and access to the DOCENT COMMUNITY message boards.Growing Great found volunteers to be our video "docents". Luckily they were professionals, so we needed very little rehearsal. The video scripts were presented on a prompter. In each video our Docent-actor models how one lesson should be presented.
We provide bulleted reminders as well as highlighting the key takeaways. Each lesson comprised six sections: INTRODUCTION, NUTRITION 101, IN THE CLASSROOM, FOOD SAMPLES, REVIEW and a QUIZ, and a completel lesson packet ready to download.We provide a quiz to help the Docents reinforce the key points of the lessons. It is not graded, but completion was required.
Overall, with the help of Growing Great and their growing community of volunteers and specialists we created a hub for GROWING GREAT DOCENTS who wish to learn about nutrition, making good food choices, how to plant and nourish vegetables so they can pass their knowledge on to the children.