Blog

At our university, we are focused on raising the awareness of our secondary degree programs that prepare students to be secondary STEM teachers. We have displayed posters around campus, hung banners in STEM buildings, staffed tables at major fairs, and worked with first-year advisors of freshman, first-time-in college students, and undeclared majors. Another recruitment approach […]

When thinking about science education during the pandemic, a critical theme emerged: space matters. Teaching and learning about science education through video-conferencing software does not provide the appropriate environmental conditions to adequately prepare teacher candidates for real-world, in-person teaching (Rapanta et al., 2021; Ray & Srivastava, 2020). The flattening of the environment to two-dimensional computer […]

For over twenty years, several mathematics education initiatives (Campbell et al., 2003; Martin et al., 2011; Strutchens & Martin, 2013; and others) have been exploring teacher leadership as a mechanism for preparing and supporting teachers to make classrooms equitable for all students. In this blog, we share three case studies of teacher leaders. Each teacher […]

A Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) served as the foundation for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013a). During the past decade, 20 states and the District of Columbia adopted the NGSS, and 28 additional states developed their own standards based on the Framework. The NGSS are expected […]

Recently, STEM teachers have been afforded more opportunities to grow as leaders, such as through the Noyce Track 3 Master Teaching Fellows (MTF) program. However, as Poekart (2012) noted, the movement from teacher to teacher leader requires a “profound identity shift” (p. 174). Not enough research exists that delves deeply into how this identity shift […]