Developing Urban Education Teachers in STEM subjects

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The Noyce Program at Eastern Michigan University (EMU)integrates the recruiting, advising, training, and mentoring activities of the internally funded Minority Achievement, Retention, and Success (MARS) program housed in EMU's Office of Urban Education & Educational Equity (OUEEE) with the science curriculum enrichment activities of the Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) Program. By linking gateway science courses with a field experience and seminar that focuses on issues facing STEM teachers in high-need school districts, STEM majors pursuing secondary teaching certification understand and respond to the challenges and rewards of teaching in high-need schools. The resulting curricular linkages promote the existing institutional focus on the preparation of secondary STEM teachers in high-need school districts with a total of 25 scholars being supported by Noyce Scholarships, doubling the number of STEM certified teachers over the five-year period of the grant. The Office of Urban Education and Educational Equity coordinates field experiences in, and linkages with, high-need school districts that are necessary for obtaining pre-service Master Teacher mentors, classroom experiences for Noyce Scholars, job placement, mentor teachers during teacher induction, and teacher evaluations. Participating districts include the Ypsilanti Public Schools, Lincoln Consolidated School District, Willow Run School District, Ann Arbor School District, Inkster Public Schools, Wayne-Westland Public Schools, and Washtenaw Intermediate School District. The Noyce Program at EMU is testing the hypothesis that the MARS model is suitably robust to produce similar retention success with motivated STEM teachers in high-need high schools as it has for new teachers of other disciplines (great than 98% over a period of 5 years). The evaluators use qualitative methods to obtain information on the impacts of the CSIE/MARS collaboration on pre-service-teacher retention and new-teacher persistence in high-need schools. This research represents an extension of the studies of the generalized effects of CSIE on STEM majors by focusing on secondary STEM teaching majors.