Striking a STEM Teacher Pipeline: A Capacity Building Project

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The project aims to serve the national need of building capacity to address effective strategies for recruiting and retaining mathematics teachers in high-need schools. The project aspires to strengthen, re-imagine, and develop partnerships between university faculty and high-need school districts to structure necessary educational pipelines specific to mathematics education. A key strategy to be used relies on these partnerships for opportunities to establish students’ interest in teaching secondary mathematics at high-need schools and eventually enroll participants in a Bachelor’s/Master’s curricular pathway to secondary mathematics teaching. Founded on standards-based instruction and tenets of culturally responsive teaching, the Bachelor’s/Master’s curricular pathway will focus on examinations of instructional practices that best address the complex demands of teaching in high-need schools. Ultimately, the pathway could make positive contributions to high-need schools and their local communities by developing certified, culturally responsive teachers with this unique preparation.This project at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) includes partnerships with three high-need school districts: FAMU Developmental Research School K-12, Gadsden County School District and Jefferson County Schools K-12. Project goals include: 1) conducting a needs assessment to better understand strengths and challenges at neighboring high-need schools by engaging secondary students, teachers, and administrators, STEM undergraduate majors, and faculty at FAMU; 2) strengthening partnerships between FAMU and neighboring high-need schools to co-investigate and co-design effective models to incorporate into a Bachelor’s/Master’s curricular pathway; 3) enhancing collaborations among FAMU faculty to build the capacity of university faculty members to offer instruction and experiences that support preservice mathematics teachers’ learning; 4) co-designing, with FAMU faculty and neighboring high-need school districts, instructional tasks and field clinical experiences for incorporation in a Bachelor’s/Master’s curricular pathway 5) enhancing institutional knowledge of methodologies for recruitment, preparation, and retention of STEM teachers for high-need schools; and 6) systematically identifying project successes, impacts, challenges, and outcomes to develop a more comprehensive project to support secondary mathematics teacher candidates. This Capacity Building 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 effectiveness and retention 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.