Save travel time and money when you attend the WomenTech Educators
Online Training from the comfort of your own desk.

In this video, your trainer Donna Milgram shares a "confession" about a lab strategy that will help your female students:

Source: Participants in WomenTech Educators Online Training. External evaluator's report to the National Science Foundation for the CalWomenTech Scale-Up Project, March 2013.

You Will Learn:

Attend the WomenTech Educators Training from the comfort of your own desk.

Females in STEM: Key Factors for Recruitment

✓ Top three recruitment strategies & how to put them to use
✓ How to adopt a program-wide “female friendly” recruitment approach
✓ How to communicate the benefits of STEM at each stage of the recruitment process
✓ Effective strategies to involve faculty & staff in your recruiting effort

Gender Diversity in STEM: Boosting Enrollment & Implementing New Culture

✓ Barriers to recruiting women into STEM & how to overcome them
✓ How to identify your target audience for recruitment and low-hanging fruit
✓ Success in STEM: See actionable examples of successful STEM programs

Strategies to Keep STEM Students on Course & Improve Graduation Rates

✓ How to make female students feel welcome and what not to do
✓ Ways to bolster confidence in STEM students to ensure success
✓ Strategies to help your female students be successful in the lab
✓ Building block skills to help close the experience gap

Addressing the STEM Challenge: Appeal to Women Who Aren't Excited by STEM

✓ How faculty can teach to female learning styles
✓ How to connect students with female role models & create community
✓ An "ah-ha" moment on spatial reasoning - what you need to know

Build a Leadership Team Model for Women in STEM: Strategies for Success

✓ Ways to partner with faculty, administrators, student services & others
✓ No educator is an island: How to work together & boost STEM retention
✓ Top 3 qualities of an effective Leadership Team & how to employ them

Download a sample letter to gain support (DOC).

Time period: 1-week orientation starts March 2, 2015 then 5 weeks on recruitment (Mar 2-Apr 12), a 1-week break in the middle, and 5 weeks on retention (Apr 20-May 22).
Time required: About 2-3 hours per week. This can include the time to start implementing your team’s plan and seeing results, even while the training is happening!
Training format: Presentations, handouts & exercises online, available to watch and complete at your convenience each week.
Live question and answer training call in Weeks 5 and 10 for Gold and Silver level teams.
Exclusive online community forum to connect with other training participants.
Archives: All calls and sessions recorded and emailed out the next day.

Continuing Education Credit:

Fresno Pacific University is now offering one unit of continuing education credit to online training participants! Note: You can sign up for the continuing education credit starting four weeks in advance of training.

Teams communicate as a single voice during the program. While team members may watch modules individually, the team joins together weekly to synthesize and apply the information into a group assignment. These assignments build to create full recruitment and retention action plans by the end of the training.

Experience and research show that participating as a team sets you up to be successful and see results. IWITTS has found in our 5 NSF-funded projects and 20 years of offering professional development that educators who work in teams develop stronger Women in STEM Recruitment and Retention Plans, are able to get the support they need to start implementing those plans right away, and are more likely to institutionalize lasting change.

Some of the many benefits of participating as a team:

• Team participation enhances and encourages engagement in the online training and the practical application of training content.
• The more people you can train in your department, region, or state, the more likely you are to see significant increases in female students, as well as lasting institutional change.
• Team members support each other using a common educational language and framework, while enacting shared strategies in their local setting both during and after the fellowship. The team facilitates cross-departmental relationships and institutional change, providing benefits that go far beyond the training itself.

Your team will be the most effective if it includes a variety of stakeholders from your college dedicated to increasing the number of female students in the targeted STEM program(s). The most effective teams have 3-6 members. Ideally, a dean, department chair, technology center director, or Principal Investigator (PI) of an Advanced Technology Education (ATE) grant will act as key leader (the key contact) and an instructor from the targeted program will act as co-leader.

Recommended core team members:

• Dean or Chair of the Department of the targeted program;
• Director of the Technology Center (or equivalent if applicable);
• Principal Investigator of the ATE grant (if applicable);
• Minimum of two instructors in targeted technology courses (highly recommended);
• If you have math prerequisites for core targeted courses, a math administrator.

Other potential team members could include counselors, advisors, outreach coordinators, curriculum developers, and learning center staff. The WomenTech Educators Online Training includes additional guidance on forming and working with a Women in STEM Leadership Team outside of the online training. A full Women in STEM Leadership Team may include more than 3-6 team members, so your core online training team may grow to include other key stakeholders such as representatives from feeder high school(s) or job training programs. The larger the Women in STEM Leadership Team the greater the likelihood for change.

Download a sample "Join My Team" letter to recruit team members (DOC).

Donna Milgram is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Women in Trades, Technology and Science (IWITTS), a national nonprofit organization founded in 1994 that provides educators with a roadmap to increasing the number of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and math.

• Ms. Milgram developed the WomenTech Educators Training to help educators nationwide increase the number of women in their technology programs.
• A nationally recognized expert on closing the gender gap for women and girls in STEM, Ms. Milgram has personally conducted hundreds of WomenTech Educators Trainings in 46 states and Canada.
• She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and conference presentations including the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and Women in Engineering Proactive Network (WEPAN). Presentation highlights from 2014 include:
  • U.S. Department of Education, Moving STEM Forward in the Career, Technical and Adult Symposium;
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Challenging Technical Privilege Symposium Panel; and,
  • Engineering for Kids Conference (Keynote Presenter)
• Donna has been featured in the media on CNN, Fox Morning News, C-Span, and National Public Radio, and has been quoted in major newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, and more.
• An innovative leader, Donna Milgram draws upon over 21 years of experience leading successful projects. The recent CalWomenTech Project was highlighted by the National Science Foundation for demonstrating significant achievement and program effectiveness and chosen as 1 of 3 model projects by the American Association of University Women.

"The training was time well spent. It was such a minimal amount of time to get so many concrete implementable strategies. The WomenTech Educators Online Training gives you the most for your money—you can implement the tools immediately with minimal resources and see true quantitative results!"

~ Phyllis Baca, Director of STEM Initiatives, Santa Fe Community College, Santa Fe, NM

"We have the first three women in our Auto Technology Program and really want to make sure they succeed. After participating in the WomenTech Educator’s online training, we created additional open lab time for them, realizing they may need extra time to develop hands-on skills in a nonthreatening atmosphere. Two months into the course they are still with us. I learned so much about retention from the online training, I decided our entire Engineering and Technology Department could benefit and we are bringing the online training to our school and rolling it out to all of the technical faculty over the next two years."

~ Van Madray, Dean of Construction and Industrial Technology Division, Pitt Community College, Winterville, NC

"Attending the WomenTech Educators training was the best decision I have made in a long time! During the training, I developed a recruitment and retention plan for one of the CIS programs. This is not a training where you consider doing “something” when you get back to your office, you are actually developing and obtaining feedback from other colleagues on what they have done and how you can improve your plan before implementation! Plus, I will be able to take my experience and work on other programs of study using the same framework."

~ Edna Quintana Claus, Ph.D., M.B.A., CIS Division Director, Texas State Technical College Harlingen, Texas

"The WomenTech Educators Online Training has the potential to change the way you view your program. Important data is presented with passion and humor. I want you to know I have gained a great deal from the course. By the time you have a graduate degree and have worked in education for decades, most "professional development" is repetitive. I can honestly say that you have given me much to think about and that it will result in changes to my approach to course development."

~ Lauran Sattler, Department Chair, Computer Information Systems, Ivy Tech Community College, President's Award for Instructional Excellence 2007, Warsaw, IN

"The online training was very manageable because it was asynchronous. I'm always teaching an overload, but you watch the training videos at your leisure, and participate as you're able. Because of that I was able to integrate the training into my very busy schedule."

~ Dr. Cynthia V. Marcello, Associate Professor, Computer Information Systems, SUNY Sullivan, Loch Sheldrake, NY

"I learned a lot of new methods and perspectives on retention I did not have before and I've already started making changes on how I do things here at my school! The WomenTech Educators Online Training was a content-filled and highly informative training program."

~ Antigone Sharris, Full-time Faculty & Program Coordinator, Engineering Technology Program, Triton College, River Grove, IL

Bonuses When You Enroll Now:

We've added these two bonuses to the training because our busy educators do not need to recreate the wheel. You'll have template outreach materials to help with recruitment from the get-go, as well as a way to find free and low cost classroom resources.

	Women in Technology Outreach Kit ($150 value) This Outreach Kit plus the included Online Website Strategy Guide will help you increase the number of women in your school’s technology programs.  Learn where to find female role models, and exactly what to ask them. You’ll take the guesswork out of your outreach with these proven recruitment materials.
	STEM Resources for Instructors to Help Women and Girls: Annotated Bibliography  ($35 value) We’ve made it easy for you to find online role model resources that will help women and girls see themselves in all career pathways. Also, find sample curriculums and websites that teach programming in a female-friendly way. Don’t miss this; it will save you many hours of researching this yourself.

"For a long time, we heard from educators, 'Well, we can't find any girls who WANT to be welders'- but now, there's an increased perception that supporting female students in male-dominated careers is a much bigger deal, and there are resources available that can give all students a better ability to explore and pursue their interests. IWITTS materials like the STEM bibliography and Outreach Kit are a huge part of the resources we can offer to districts to help them serve their students. It's not just about Perkins compliance anymore." ~ Don Levine, CTE Education Specialist, Alaska Department of Education and Early Development