Mentoring Urban STEM Teachers for Equity and Innovation

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This project aims to serve the national need to increase the diversity of students entering STEM professions by supporting and training a broader diversity of secondary STEM teachers to teach those students. The project team will recruit post-baccalaureate STEM professionals, drawn from a wide range of demographic, disciplinary, and professional backgrounds, to careers in secondary STEM teaching. In turn, the project will prepare these professionals for the challenging task of serving as STEM educators in under-resourced urban communities. Project team members will foster a synergistic collaboration among university faculty, secondary-school educators, and community partners. In particular, the participants will be prepared in the pedagogical and cultural knowledge needed for effective teaching in underserved communities. As part of induction, the investigators will provide sustained mentorship to the new teachers as they implement that knowledge in the classroom. As a result, the project will contribute directly to the development of a skilled STEM workforce in the United States.Based at Kutztown University (KU) in Pennsylvania, the project includes partnerships between the KU College of Education and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Reading and Allentown School Districts, and community partners. The project has several guiding goals. First is to recruit, provide scholarships to, support the academic training of, generate teacher-certification for, and place in high-need local education agencies (LEAs) twenty-five (25) STEM professionals through the five-year duration of the project. The training and certification of professionals with STEM degrees will be via a one-year Master's of Education degree program. A second goal is to increase the demographic diversity of STEM teachers through this program. The third goal is to prepare STEM teachers to be capable of implementing culturally relevant approaches to STEM education through a community-based co-curricular program. A culminating goal is to provide sustained induction mentorship and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) workshops for the new teachers by engaging both education and STEM faculty in the process. This induction program will continue through the first two years of post-degree teaching. Project evaluation and research will assess the impact and merit of underlying components of the program on both the Noyce scholars and faculty members. In particular, the investigators and external evaluator will employ mixed-methods approaches to explore the values of: (1) STEM-faculty mentoring related to both content and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK); (2) an annual workshop on implementation of PCK by Noyce scholars in the STEM classroom; (3) education-faculty mentoring and co-curricular experiences on implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in the classroom; and (4) the effects that mentoring Noyce scholars on PCK and CRP have on the STEM and education faculty mentors themselves. This Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the retention and effectiveness of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.