Cultivating University-School-Community Partnerships to Prepare STEM Undergraduates to Teach in Urban Environments

This project aims to address the national urban teacher shortage by preparing and supporting STEM undergraduates to effectively teach in culturally diverse, urban, high-need schools. The project will recruit 18 undergraduates majoring in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematical science, actuarial mathematics, computer science, or engineering. These students will receive scholarships during the third and fourth year of their undergraduate STEM degree while participating in the teacher preparation program.

The teacher preparation program will include training in culturally responsive pedagogy, combined with teaching experiences in community-based settings. These experiences are expected to enable the new teachers to apply their content and pedagogical knowledge within the context of the local community. To support this goal, the new teachers will be supported in their first two years of teaching through an induction program.

This project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute includes partnerships with community-based organizations, such as the Worcester EcoTarium Museum and Worcester Parks & Recreation Department, and two local high-need schools (Worcester Public Schools and Leominster Public Schools). The goal of the project is to recruit, prepare, and support STEM undergraduates from a range of diverse backgrounds to successfully teach in urban, high-need schools with diverse student populations.

Program objectives designed to meet this goal are to: 1) improve recruitment strategies to grow and diversify teacher candidate cohorts; 2) engage STEM teacher candidates with early teaching experiences; 3) build STEM teacher candidates' cultural competency in a local community with rich cultural diversity; and 4) provide professional development and networking opportunities to facilitate induction support for the project's new teachers in the first and second years of teaching. Evaluation of the efficacy of these trainings and community-based teaching experiences will be gathered through teacher candidate and mentor teacher interviews and surveys.

The multiple touch points in the community will be investigated to determine how their frequency and dosage affect teacher candidate attitudes and preparation to teach in high-need school districts, as evidenced by the construction of an e-portfolio of teaching activities and a reflection journal to document and enable analysis of their teaching paths. This project may provide insight into the strategies and best practices for leveraging university-school-community partnerships in recruiting, training, and retaining STEM educators for urban districts while highlighting practices to increase teacher effectiveness with students from diverse populations.

This Track 1: Scholarships and Stipend 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.