Preparing Engaged STEM Teachers through Multi-level Peer Mentoring and Early Teaching Experiences

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This project aims to serve the national need for preparing diverse, high-quality STEM teachers with deep content knowledge who are responsive to needs of students. The project will provide scholarship support to STEM majors who seek teacher certification, with recruitment focused principally on physics, chemistry, and mathematics majors. Scholars will participate in field-based teacher preparation collaboratively delivered by STEM and Education faculty. Project faculty will conduct monthly full-day Saturday workshops to enhance Scholars’ teaching-focused content knowledge and content-specific pedagogical skills. This project will also partially support the operation of a Learning Assistant (LA) Program. In addition to providing compelling early teaching experiences for undergraduates, the LA Program introduces students to research in STEM education through an LA teaching methods course, including investigation of issues of equity and identity in STEM. Project staff will use strong partnerships with area school districts to facilitate certified Scholars’ employment in high-needs schools and will provide two years of induction through a Vertical Peer Mentoring Network. Project personnel will engage in a research and evaluation agenda that will contribute to the knowledge base about STEM teacher preparation. This project at Texas State University includes partnerships with the Hutto, Leander, and Lockhart Independent School Districts. Project goals include the preparation of 20 to 30 STEM teachers over the five-year life of the project; recruiting primarily physics, chemistry, and mathematics majors; and supporting Scholars through both undergraduate and post-baccalaureate pathways into teaching. The LA Program design is informed by Communities of Practice theory and its relationship to identity formation, with a primary goal of the program being to support students’ development of STEM identity. Vertical Peer Mentoring employs all three elements of Vygotsky’s theory: social interaction, the concept of the "more knowledgeable other," and the educational psychology concept of the zone of proximal development. The research and evaluation plans bring together the quantitative power of the Texas Education Research Center longitudinal data lake with its national vantage on STEM teacher preparation, to answer questions about teacher preparation quality, the impact of mentoring, and influences on teacher career choice and teaching practices. 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 persistence, 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.