- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1852735
- First Name Gretchen
- Last Name Andreasen
- Registration Faculty/Administrator/Other
- Discipline STEM Education (general)
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Gretchen Andreasen, University of California, Santa Cruz
Need
The shortage of math and science teachers affects all our partner districts. Regional community colleges and universities want to play a role in addressing the shortage.
Research Questions
What gaps exist in the existing infrastructure for math and science teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention? How can existing efforts be changed or expanded to improve our impact? How might we better support early career teachers to persist in teaching jobs in our partner districts?
Approach
We brought together community college, university, and school district faculty and staff who support the science and math teacher pipeline for regular meetings to better understand and assist each other and to better help our students and early career teachers succeed as they move through the pipeline. We identified three broad areas of focus (developing a STEM teacher identity and providing academic support, recruitment and pathways into STEM teaching, and teacher needs and intern support) and formed three working groups to develop tools to support and advance regional collaborations around these topics. We were guided by ideas and processes for advancing innovation and problem solving in “Networked Improvement Communities” (NICs).
Outcomes
~NIC products~ We convened working groups of colleagues from five school districts, three community colleges, and two universities to better integrate teacher pathway efforts among the partner institutions. The working groups focused on three topics, developed collaboratively during the first two years of the grant: Project 1, recruitment and pathways into STEM teaching; Project 2, developing a STEM teacher identity and providing academic supports; and Project 3, teacher needs and teacher intern support. Project 3 developed and assembled a website incorporating resources for new teacher support at the district and site level (https://sites.google.com/salinasuhsd.org/new-teacher-support/home). Our goal for this project is to extend and adapt the foundational work on new teacher support to a wider audience of district and site leaders. Project 2 has developed a handbook and many documents intended to support teachers to implement effective peer tutoring programs (https://noycenic.sites.ucsc.edu/district-and-college-resources/math-plus-program-and-peer-tutoring/). They established a tiny professional learning community (PLC) in 2023-24 with an early career teacher who is starting a peer tutoring program in his own school. They intend to recruit additional teachers to expand this effort in 2024-25. Project 1 developed a website (https://noycenic.sites.ucsc.edu/) to share information on regional pathways into math or science teaching. This website continues to be refined. In 2023-24, with particular leadership from Hartnell College, the project is working on an infographic and slide show about STEM teaching pathways. ~STEM Education Central Coast Conference~ An unanticipated, but highly valuable, outgrowth of Project 1 is the engagement of the UCSC Noyce leadership team as members of the planning committee for a regional STEM Education Central Coast Conference (stemedccc.org). We held the second annual full-scale conference in February 2024 and are already planning for 2025. Students from both universities and two of our Noyce community college partners (as well as other community colleges) attended the meeting in February along with teachers and many informal science educators from around the region, with nearly 200 participants in total. ~Early Career Teacher Support “Mentor-Pair” Projects~ To more deeply root Noyce graduates in the community of their own schools, we invited graduates employed in partner districts to propose small, collaborative, year-long projects with a mentor. Both the mentor and Noyce teacher were offered a small stipend to work together 1-2 hours/week (or ½-1 day/month). The “Mentor-Pair Project” was intended to provide a simple framework to support new teachers to integrate into the professional community at their schools in order to enhance the teaching effectiveness, job satisfaction, and integration into their districts of our Noyce graduates. In the second year the teacher-proposed projects are focused on community building – among teachers within or across schools, among students within a school, and among teachers and students. The 2023-24 projects are: 1) Reading and discussing Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl.; 2) Developing a Science Buddies program in which 8th graders are paired with 6th graders to work on a hands-on science project; 3) Aligning biotechnology courses that are taught at two different schools in a large district by teachers who have no on-site counterparts; 4) Establishing a curriculum to support high school students who are serving as teaching assistants in our graduate’s physics classroom with mentorship from two retired teachers who are members of the NIC Leadership Team. The mid-year reports submitted by the participating teachers suggest that the work is going well, and the flexibility and respect that our graduates and their colleagues experience are effective in building teacher confidence and enthusiasm.
Broader Impacts
The project emphasizes “growing our own” teacher workforce, explicitly recruiting from our local population of high school and community college students. This approach will lead to a more diverse teacher population and teachers who understand the needs of the communities they came from.
