- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1660713
- First Name John
- Last Name Stewart
- Discipline Physics
- Presenters
John Stewart, West Virginia University, jcstewart1@mail.wvu.edu
Need
This Noyce project will support at least 25 additional new high school teachers with $14,500 scholarships annually, up to two years. It leverages the internal expertise in the WVU Center for Excellence in STEM Education, coupled with the implementation of an UTeach replication site (WVUteach), to fulfill an institutional commitment to increase the number of STEM teachers produced both in the short and long term. This poster will describe a promising strategy for preparing students to teach in the high-need environment with the UTeach model. This preparation helps mentor teachers and students to recognize their own cultural biases and to recognize how these biases are inadvertently communicated to their students. Once this negative communication is identified and eliminated, it can be replaced with positive messages that encourage underrepresented students to pursue academically challenging coursework. This preparation has been successfully tested in urban environments.
Goals
This project seeks to answer the following questions: 1) How does Noyce scholarship support affect the growth of the teacher preparation program in an economically challenged state? 2) Is NAPE micromessaging training effective in preparing teachers for rural classrooms? 3) Do highly qualified teachers improve student success in the rural classroom?
Approach
WVUteach-Noyce implements a promising strategy for preparing teachers to serve in high-need classrooms and will aid in its dissemination. The project supports the rapid expansion of WVU’s new four-year STEM teacher preparation program, WVUteach, by providing scholarships to STEM majors to go into teaching while also implementing a partnership to provide relevant cultural competence, pedagogical knowledge and disposition to our students and the mentor teachers that will support them as they learn to teach in high-need Appalachian schools. Both lead to sustainable outcomes that will be addressed in this proposal. WVUteach is supported by a leadership team with a proven record of successful recruitment and retention of STEM teacher candidates, particularly in the high shortage areas of physics and chemistry.
Outcomes
In its fourth year, WVUteach has graduated its first full cohort of teachers. However, attrition due to the financial challenges all too common to WV students is a barrier to program growth. Financial challenges are often encountered because WV students do not receive adequate preparation at the high school level to enter calculus their freshman year. This extends their time to degree which causes them to exhaust their four-year scholarships before graduation. WVUteach-Noyce will provide a financial solution for some students in the short term while WVUteach provides the long-term solution of a better trained STEM teacher workforce. The NAPE micromessaging curriculum is fully integrated in the WVUteach program. We began evaluation of its effectiveness with qualitative and quantitative research this year.
Broader Impacts
The project will support 25 desperately needed math and science teachers while integrating a promising professional development activity for teaching in the high needs classroom into the UTeach curriculum. The 25 teachers (and the support for the growth of the program which will produce more teachers) will dramatically impact the educational outcomes of the children of West Virginia. The micro-messaging professional development, if proven efficacious, could be disseminated to all UTeach replication sites.
