Engineering and Education Partnership: Preparing the Next Generation of Cross Disciplinary Trained STEM Teachers

当教育界讨论下一代STEM教师的准备时，很少有人认为获得工程学位的教师是进入教师职业的途径。拥有工程学位的教师有能力通过设计、解决问题、实验、制作和理解他们所生活的设计世界与自然世界之间的平衡来帮助年轻的学习者“连接STEM点”。STEM学习往往是抽象的，STEM科目往往是孤立地教授，没有参考和有意义的联系。该项目通过强调综合STEM （isstem）教师准备，包括跨STEM学科的综合设计（iDesign），拓宽了STEM学习领域，不仅培养了新一代受过工程培训的教师，而且还重新设计了传统的STEM教师准备模式，包括跨STEM学科的教师准备，强调内容边界跨越，并准备教师在学校的跨职能多元化团队中工作。该项目将为职前STEM教师的工程课程整合新的设计项目，并开设一门新的跨学科STEM方法课程，为其他院校提供借鉴。因此，它将为改善本科教育做出实质性的贡献。通过工程学位途径培养教师，交叉培训STEM教师，为STEM教学、学习和研究开辟了全新的视角。在这个项目中进行的研究旨在揭示和衡量STEM学习的两个新的创造性前沿；1) STEM关联流畅性；2)STEM跨职能多元化团队的教与学。教师的STEM关联流畅性是教师在设计和传授教学时流畅而深入地应用STEM内容和背景的能力。设计和测试的量表包括系统量表的扩展和改进，以测量教师的STEM联想流畅性。跨职能设计团队的教学和学习包括来自不同STEM学科的STEM教师团队，他们学习蓝图（明确）学科基础内容，共同规划和设计集成设计（iDesign）干预措施，要求学生在设计或基于问题的学习环境中应用交叉STEM内容，概念和实践。我们将设计和测试一个新的设计量表来测量和评估教师的跨职能设计干预。其他寻求为学生开辟职业道路的工程学院和学院将受益于本项目产生的研究、工具和策略。最终，让工科本科生意识到在K-12阶段从事教学工作的可能性，将对未来大学预科阶段STEM学科教师的数量和质量产生深远影响。

When the preparation of the next generation of STEM teachers is discussed in education circles, few think of teachers earning an engineering degree as a pathway to entering the teaching profession. Teachers prepared with an engineering degree are well equipped to help young learners "connect the STEM dots" through design, problem solving, experimentation, making, and understanding the balance between the designed and natural world in which they live. STEM learning is often abstract and STEM subjects are too often taught in isolation without reference and meaningful connections. This project broadens the STEM learning landscape by emphasizing integrated STEM (iSTEM) teacher preparation that includes integrated design (iDesign) across STEM subjects by not only preparing a new breed of engineering trained teachers, but also by redesigning the traditional STEM teacher preparation model to include cross STEM discipline teacher preparation that emphasizes content border crossings and prepares teachers to work in cross functional diversity teams in schools. The project will result in the integration of new design projects in the engineering curricula for pre-service STEM teachers and a new cross-discipline STEM methods course that will serve as a model for other institutions to adopt. Thus, it will make a substantive contribution to improving undergraduate education.Preparing teachers through an engineering degree pathway and cross-training STEM teachers opens a whole new perspective to STEM teaching, learning, and research. Research conducted in this project is designed to unpack and measure two new inventive frontiers in STEM learning; 1) STEM associational fluency and 2) teaching and learning in cross-functional STEM diversity teams. STEM associational fluency in teachers is the teacher's ability to fluidly and deeply apply STEM content and contexts while designing and delivering instruction. Scales designed and tested include the expansion and refinement of an iSTEM scale to measure STEM associational fluency in teachers. Teaching and learning in cross functional design teams incorporates teams of STEM teachers from the varied STEM disciplines learning to blueprint (make explicit) disciplinary grounded content, co-plan, and design integrated design (iDesign) interventions that require students to apply cross cutting STEM content, concepts, and practices within a design or problem-based learning context. A new iDesign scale to measure and assess teachers' cross-functional iDesign interventions will be designed and tested. Other colleges and schools of engineering seeking to open up career pathways for their students will have benefit of the research, tools and strategies generated through this project. Ultimately, making engineering undergraduate students aware of the possibility of a teaching career at the K-12 level will have profound impact on the number and quality of teachers of STEM disciplines at the pre-college level in the future.