Collaborative Research: Strategies to Improve the Recruitment and Retention of Black Male STEM Teachers

The project serves the national need of recruiting and retaining highly effective Black male high school STEM teachers. This research project will investigate factors influencing the effectiveness and retention of Black male STEM teachers in high-need school districts. The study will examine the academic and career decision-making processes and experiences of Black male STEM teachers as well as the culturally responsive practices they use in their classrooms to motivate and engage ethnically and racially diverse students.

Using a mixed methods approach, the first phase will examine how Black male teachers’ educational backgrounds, professional characteristics, dispositions, and experiences, and school environments lead to their academic and career persistence as STEM educators as well as what contributes to their effectiveness as teachers. The second phase will examine the influences that Black male STEM teachers have in the classroom with their students.

The project outcomes will highlight the voices, knowledge, and experiences of both Black male STEM career academy teachers and ethnically and racially diverse students to provide critical insights and perspectives into how instructional strategies may engage diverse learners and promote their STEM college and career interests.

This project at Florida State University and The Ohio State University will focus on a national network of 211 Engineering and Information Technology career academies through collaboration with NAF (formerly known as the National Academy Foundation). The network involves 173 urban high schools, serving 46,719 students. A subset of Black male teachers and students from these academies will serve as the research subjects.

Project goals include uncovering the pedagogical practices of Black male STEM teachers and their impact and effectiveness with ethnically and racially diverse STEM learners’ achievement, engagement, interests, learning, and persistence in STEM. The project will be informed by culturally responsive pedagogies and ethnic matching frameworks. Using a mixed methods approach, the project will investigate seven research questions: factors that contributed to Black males’ decision to pursue a career in teaching STEM; practices for improving the recruitment of the next generation of Black male teachers; challenges and barriers that Black male STEM teachers face in the school/classroom; culturally responsive pedagogical practices used by Black male STEM teachers to effectively engage ethnically and racially diverse students; perceptions of Black male students of their Black male STEM teachers; experiences, interactions, connections, and opportunities that have the most positive influence on ethnically and racially diverse students’ academic engagement and experiences in the STEM classroom; and effectiveness of Black male STEM teachers in high-need school districts associated with improving the student learning of ethnically and racially diverse students.

Findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals, policy briefs, research zines, and infographics to participating schools as well as interactive webinars. This Track 4: Noyce Research 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 effectiveness and retention 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.