Meeting the Needs of Diverse Students through a Next Generation of Science Teacher Leadership in Nebraska

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing outstanding and highly qualified science teacher leaders in high-need schools to address four critical needs of regional and national importance. The first is to retain mid-career science teachers in high-need schools. The second is to provide high-quality, equitable science teaching of students with diverse learning needs.

The third is to promote strong subject matter knowledge for teaching secondary science. And the fourth is to adapt 7-12 science curriculum to meet the Next Generation Science Standards. Title I schools (which are those with a high percentage of students from low-income families) are disproportionately affected by low retention of highly qualified teachers.

Evidence suggests that teachers must have access to ongoing, high-quality professional development and learning opportunities to improve their pedagogical skills and remain motivated to stay in high-need schools. This project will provide unique professional development, statewide networking opportunities, and educational degree advancement to exceptional secondary science teachers in Nebraska.

Participating teachers will complete an educational specialist degree, a teacher-designed leadership project focused on promoting equitable science learning, and National Board Certification. This project aims to ensure greater access to equitable and high-quality education for culturally and racially diverse students in Nebraska. It has the potential to inform multiple models for effective science teaching, which will be broadly disseminated nationally in response to a vision of scientific literacy for all.

This project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) includes partnerships with two high-need school districts (Lincoln Public Schools and Omaha Public Schools) and one lead rural school district (Grand Island Public Schools). The goal of this six-year project is to strengthen science education in Nebraska by recruiting 26 in-service science teachers to become teacher leaders through an educational specialist degree program and long-term professional development.

The leadership team will use the conceptual framework of equitable science and engineering learning offered by the Advancing Coherent and Equitable Systems of Science Education project to ground all aspects of the program and its goals. In conjunction with professional development, the project will use systematic data collection and analysis to investigate research questions regarding what teacher leaders learn, how they use key concepts from coursework to design equity-focused leadership projects, the extent to which teacher leaders generate leadership projects that attend to and facilitate knowledge about diverse students’ learning, and how teachers’ personal and statewide professional networks change over time.

The project will be evaluated using qualitative and quantitative methods with a longitudinal design to compare outcomes over time and assess progress toward meeting project goals. Project research and evaluation will produce new fundamental knowledge of effective teacher leader development models, reform-based equitable teaching practices, and high-quality education for diverse students in Nebraska and beyond, which will be disseminated via conferences, peer-reviewed journals, and a UNL-supported website.

This Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships 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.