STEM Center for Teaching and Learning
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The STEM Center for Teaching and Learning facilitates enhanced teaching and research in STEM disciplines throughout West Tennessee.
Education Studies, University of Tennessee-Martin, The
Established: 2015
Profile submitted by John Overcash
Vision and Goals
The STEM center for Teaching and Learning provides professional development and equipment for delivery of standards based content by K-12 teachers guided by their Tennessee Department of Education evaluation tool. The Center collaborates with industry, educators, and state policymakers to insure its programs are relevant to the needs of the region. The Center inspires students to learn and apply the concepts of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Center/Program Structure
The STEM center for Teaching and Learning is run by two faculty members, each with the title of Co-director. One faculty member, a chemist, has a dual appointment in the Department of Educational Studies (DES) and the Department of Chemistry and Physics (DCP). The other is a mathematician with dual appointments in DES and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics (DMS). Each has 50% release time from teaching to devote to STEM Center programs. DCP and DMS are both within the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences, while DES is in the College of Education, Health, and Behavioral Sciences. The co-directors are direct reports to the university's Provost, with responsibility for collaborative reporting to the deans of both of the colleges. Staff from DES provide administrative support for the center.
Are there advantages of being structured this way?
From the beginning, a key role of the STEM Center for Teaching and learning has been to provide professional development for current K-12 teachers in STEM content areas. Faculty within DES have contacts with, understand the culture of, and speak the language of K-12 teachers. Departments within the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences have a depth of knowledge of the STEM content areas. The dual appointments provide the Co-directors access to both of these skill sets.
Are there particular challenges that result from this structure?
The dual appointments mean that both co-directors have duties outside the STEM center. This has not been a major challenge, and the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Funding
All of our funding currently comes from a five-year U.S. Department of Education grant. The duties of the co-directors include seeking additional funding to sustain the center in the future.
How has this funding structure influenced the undergraduate STEM education programming the center offers?
Funding includes $25,000 set aside for content resource kits available for regional teachers and student teachers in our educator preparation program to check out as from a library for classroom use.
What are the specific advantages of having a center funded in this way?
The funding earmarked for classroom content resource kits is a specific advantage.
What are the challenges?
The initial grant funding the center is for five years. The university plans to absorb the cost of running the center at the end of five years.
Has this funding structure has changed over time?
The initial grant funding the center is for five years. The university plans to absorb the cost of running the center at the end of five years.
Description of Programming
Our most active program so far has been professional development workshops for K-12 teachers. These workshops provide training with equipment, lesson plans connecting the training to state mathematics standards, and the actual equipment for teachers to use. In addition, the center maintains additional equipment sets for teachers to borrow. Teachers who were unable to attend the workshops can borrow equipment for particular lessons.
The STEM Center for Teaching and Learning provided a mathematics professional development workshop for elementary school teachers in summer 2015. In the summer of 2016, we provided three mathematics workshops for thirty participants each. There was an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school workshop, and a total of 85 participants completed the 16 hour workshops. We are planning workshops for science teachers in summer 2017.
Successes and Impacts
Our biggest success so far was inclusion of lesson plans with activities and hands-on strategies designed by university faculty and presented during the professional development workshops. University mathematics and engineering faculty members are not accustomed to the lesson plan format used by K-12 teachers. For the STEM Center workshops they made a special effort to express the activities in that format, including the standards addressed, a script for the activity, potential accommodations, potential high-quality questions to ask during the activity, and assessments. Eighty-five teachers participating in the workshops received these lesson plans. We documented the impact of these lesson plans through a participant satisfaction survey completed on the last day of each workshop.
Evaluation and Assessment
How does your center demonstrate its value, both in terms of assessing its own programming and responding to external evaluation?
We take pictures of our workshops and share them with various audiences through a newsletter. We conduct satisfaction surveys of our workshops. We invite members of our University Relations office to our events and provide them with press releases regarding our activities. We maintain records of STEM outreach activities from across our campus to assess our effectiveness for accreditation purposes.
Elements Contributing to Success
Our Department of Educational Studies has an excellent relationship with our regional Local Education Agencies. Members of the department routinely attend meetings of school superintendents, supervisors of instruction, principals, and guidance counselors. We are able to learn of their professional development needs and to share news of our programs with them. This partnership keeps our participation rate high and keeps our workshops focused on relevant material.