ACRES is a virtual coaching program that enhances the facilitation skills and confidence of educators in leading STEM activities for youth. Evidence supporting its success includes positive evaluation results, increased adoption by state networks, and high participant engagement and satisfaction rates. ACRES builds educator capacity and contributes to the well-being and retention of professionals in the field.  Link to research publications here. 

If you are early in your career, ACRES can lay the foundation for best practice for you and your colleagues. If you are later in your career, this could support your role as a coach to younger professionals, or it could be a business opportunity for you.

For each of the modules, there is a research bibliography related to why the different skillset is important. 

This website is designed for you, a new coach, to train yourself asynchronously. On the Start Here page, we invite you to learn about the ACRES approach, see videos of ACRES in action, and become familiar with the core principles of ACRES.  Then, explore the ACRES modules at your own pace. When you're ready, you can Dive Deep into additional ACRES coaching resources. 

Through 2025, the ACRES team is offering monthly sessions to support you in website navigation and answer your questions. Sign up here. We invite you to connect with other ACRES coaches via social media platforms. #ACRES

ACRES was designed for afterschool and out-of-school educators, but you, as a coach, may decide which audience you want to reach. You can determine who signs up for their ACRES sessions and if there are prerequisites. When ACRES started in 2016, we encouraged educators to start with the Asking Purposeful Questions module. You can decide how to implement ACRES with your staff.

Yes. ACRES materials are licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution Share-Alike. This does allow you to charge for your cohorts.

ACRES was designed to be implemented with minimal materials. When MMSA offered ACRES, it was free for participants, thanks to significant funding from the National Science Foundation, Noyce Foundation, and the STEM Next Opportunity Fund. 

You can schedule as many cohorts as you would like and at whatever frequency fits your schedule. (We have found that having two weeks between each of the three sessions in a cohort works best).

We invite you to make your coaching practice your own. Feel free to use the script provided and if you want to make adaptations, please do!

Absolutely! Purposeful Questions can (and should!) be asked in any STEM activity, so if you’d like to engage in a different STEM activity that fits your participants’ needs better, go for it. 

They have the same informal, supportive feel as the first session. After the first session, you’ll ask your participants to upload a 3-5 minute video of themselves asking youth purposeful questions or practicing another facilitation skill.  In the second session, each participant will share the video, and the cohort members (yourself included) will share strengths and opportunities for growth. They’ll then repeat the process in the third session with another video. Be sure to check out the Feedback Tips handout linked in each module to guide the feedback during the coaching sessions.

Welcome them in! When it is their turn to share a video, ask them to instead share a lesson/activity they are thinking of doing with youth and share what purposeful questions they would ask during the activity. Give feedback based on the lesson plan. Refer to the Feedback Resource Handbook to see examples of feedback on different artifacts of practice.

If it feels like you need a video or two to enrich the group conversation, there are Extra Videos of Educators Facilitating STEM, located in Appendix A of each module, that you are welcome to use, as well.

You can check out our Tech Tools Overview handout. We also encourage you to simply play with the technology. We promise you won’t break the internet. Reach out to a friend and colleague when you run into questions.