- Year 2018
- NSF Noyce Award # 1340107
- First Name Ruth
- Last Name Cossey
- Discipline Other: Bio/chem/physics/math
- Co-PI(s)
Diane Ketelle, Mills College, dketelle@mills.edu
Barbara LiSanti, Mills College, barbara@mills.edu
Elisabeth Baker, Mills College, ebaker@mills.edu - Presenters
Steven Luntz, Mills College, sluntz@earthlink.net
Cynthia Paniagua, Oakland Unified School District, cynthia.paniagua@ousd.org
Need
Oakland Unified School District in California, like many other urban school districts, has had a difficult time attracting and retaining effective middle school and high school STEM teachers. A partnership of Oakland Unified School District, Mills College, the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California, Berkeley, SERP, KQED and others formed to create the Oakland Urban Teacher Residency program (OUTR) that recruits, prepares, mentors and sustains STEM teachers for Oakland classrooms. These teaching fellows draw on their strong content knowledge as they develop equitable, effective instructional practices. Their teaching practices are continuously enhanced by close, research-based mentoring that began in their credential year and continue for their first four years ?of full-time teachers. Outside support helps but it is the sharpening of an inquiry stance and associated reflective practices that fuel internal continuous growth in the new STEM teachers.
Goals
GOALS: To recruit and support through a five-year induction 20 diverse Teaching Fellows with STEM college degrees and strong academic records.
Year one: provide Teaching Fellows with integrated coursework and fieldwork that prepare them to begin successful STEM teaching in Oakland, California. Teaching Fellows served an apprenticeship with a team of mentors from Mills College, Oakland Unified School District and the Lawrence Hall of Science that resulted in a STEM Preliminary Single Subject California Credentials and employment as teacher of record for the District.
Years 2 and 3: provide Teaching Fellows with coaching to strengthen both research capacity and teaching leading to a Clear California Single Subject STEM credential, tenure and a master’s degree while they are teaching full-time.
Years 4 and 5: the Teaching Fellows continue to improve their practice, develop leadership capacity in Oakland as they participate in and learn to lead in professional learning activities at the state, regional, district and school site level.
Approach
In order to achieve our objectives and goals, we provide tuition support to Teaching Fellows during their credential and MA years, plus an additional stipend of $15,000 in the credential year. In their subsequent four years as classroom teachers, they receive salary supplements of $10,000 per year. Financial support will come in the form of a forgivable loan. We selected and prepared the Mentor Teachers who played a critical role in the preparation of new teachers through co-planning, coaching the Teaching Fellow during teaching activities, and debriefing afterwards. We offered modest salary supplements of $2,000 per year to Mentor Teachers. We facilitated induction of Teaching Fellows and Mentor Teachers into Lesson Study and Mills Teacher Scholar groups that will foster and support an inquiry stance towards STEM teaching, thus integrating research and practice. We are customizing Teacher Induction and PD coaching during the first 4 years when Fellows are teachers of record.
Outcomes
We have 18 OUTR Teacher Fellows who are full time STEM teachers in Oakland. Mills Preservice Mathematics and science content course work and fieldwork have been re-aligned with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and the current research about the Next Generation Science. Each Teaching Fellow has acquired the knowledge to teach with precision, reasoning, and coherence. Fellows also possess the necessary components to assist in the successful acquisition of conceptual mathematics and science knowledge, along with specific skills and procedural fluency by their students. A key component of OUTR is engaging the Teaching Fellow, the Fellow’s mentors, and the program?s partners in a research projects to study internal teaching practices.
Broader Impacts
At the conclusion of our project a report will be disseminated that will serve as a tool for reviewing program development and guiding the expansion of OUTR into new OUSD schools. This report will include illustrative profiles and will distill lessons learned from the project, including elucidation of effective features of the project’s design and implementation, as well as challenges the project faced and strategies for solving them. Our plan is to disseminate widely the lessons learned from this project in building the STEM teaching capacity and teaching retention in a high poverty urban district. Examining and publishing in-depth cases that describe how the Teaching Fellows? skills, knowledge and dispositions are developed over time will benefit the profession by documenting a model of teacher education that graduates highly qualified mathematics and science teachers who stay in the schools that need them most.
