Evaluating Professional Development For Teachers and Giving Them the Resources They Want and Need

There is a need for more people in the Plasma Science and Fusion Energy (PS&FE) workforce. Plasma Network for Outreach and Workforce (PlasmaNOW) is a project to bridge the gap in the educational pipeline for PS&FE by engaging students, volunteers, and educators in pre-college outreach activities. My portion of the Plasma-NOW project focuses on creating a standard of evaluation instruments to assess the usefulness of previous APS Science Teachers' Day workshops and other similar professional development programs. At Teachers' Day, teachers learn about plasma physics and fusion research and ways to incorporate these concepts in lesson plans and activities in the classroom. Using these evaluations we hope to identify which types of resources would be most useful for teachers and make these resources available on the PlasmaNOW website once it is launched. We will also modify the existing Teachers' Day resources to best fit the stated needs of the teachers. Finally, we plan to share the evaluation tools on the PlasmaNOW website as a set of metrics and best practices for assessment of other teacher professional development programs. By compiling these resources, we hope that teachers make use of them, and better incorporate PS&FE into the classroom.