Elementary schools that serve large populations of minoritized youth often privilege literacy and mathematics instruction because those are the subjects included in high-stakes accountability testing. Teachers working in high-needs settings often feel isolated and need support to sustain innovative science and engineering instruction. We are committed to nurturing equity in science and engineering by empowering teacher leaders. The STEM Teacher Leader Collaborative (TLC) is a community of teachers, teacher candidates, university faculty, administrators, local business leaders, and community stakeholders that supports, celebrates, and sustains teachers’ efforts to include enriching, rigorous, equitable, and responsive science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instruction in high-needs elementary schools in the North Carolina Piedmont Triad.
What is the project’s goal?
Our goal is to transform the landscape of elementary STEM education in the NC Piedmont Triad by supporting, connecting, and retaining current and future STEM-capable, imaginative, and motivated elementary teachers.
What is the innovation?
A collaborative is a network of elementary teachers and teacher educators who meet regularly, offer one another professional support and sustain one another’s professional learning and satisfaction. The STEM TLC leverages science and engineering as contexts to explore problems of practice that teachers deem important—e.g., facilitating meaningful student collaboration and argumentation, differentiating instruction for all learners, and integrating literacy throughout the curriculum. Science and engineering also can potentially transform the culture of traditional classrooms. Students solve real-world problems, learn to collaborate with peers, engage in productive argumentation, work through failure, use data to inform design decisions and revise explanations, deepen science knowledge, and feel a genuine sense of accomplishment when their designs are successful and their ideas are treated as legitimate contributions to the learning community.
What has been the impact?
- Since 2012, the network has grown from 6 to 230+ teachers, most of whom teach in high needs schools.
Through an annual reception and summit, multi-day STEM TLC Summer Institutes, and year-long coaching, communities of inquiry, a monthly newsletter and lending library, the STEM TLC supports teachers’ empowerment in making important instructional changes, taking instructional risks, and reconnecting with the vision that brought them to teaching. - We started an MEd elementary science education program at UNC Greensboro, which grew out of STEM TLC. We start our second cohort January 2020.
- We have hired two full-time doctoral Graduate Assistants who serve as STEM Teacher Leaders, spend time in schools, collect copious data, and are planning dissertations around the TLC’s work.
