The need for teachers of STEM disciplines with considerable depth of content and pedagogical skill, as well as strategies for engaging students from diverse backgrounds to achieve success, is well documented. This project, in which the New Jersey City University (NJCU) engages Hudson County Community College, Bergen Community College, and Middlesex County College, will recruit, prepare, and support a minimum of 20 undergraduate STEM majors in their junior and senior year and 7 STEM professionals who are committed to teach in high-need school districts. The Noyce scholars will be supported by an organized program of supplemental instruction, hands-on experiential learning, mentoring, social and academic networking, professional development, and community building activities that will enhance and strengthen the content and pedagogical knowledge of the scholarship recipients, provide them with a skill set to serve students from diverse backgrounds, and increase the retention of these highly qualified teachers in high-need districts. As a minority serving institution, NJCU is well-positioned to prepare individuals from groups underrepresented in STEM to become teachers. This will provide role models to classrooms with diverse students and will strengthen the teaching and learning of STEM courses in high-need school districts.
The project will have multi-layered recruitment efforts that target several groups of potential students: NJCU STEM majors, community college STEM majors, and undecided majors. Recruitment will start early when freshman and sophomore students are offered summer internships to expose them to what it means to teach STEM. Community college STEM majors will be recruited through partnerships with three local community colleges. Participation in early field experience and mentoring by NJCU faculty and K-12 teachers will provide Noyce Scholars with a strong foundation for developing their pedagogical and discipline specific knowledge. In addition to providing opportunities for learning from experts in the different STEM and education fields, the project will develop communities of practice among the different cohorts of Noyce scholars through workshops which create a venue for interaction of the pre-service scholarship recipients learning from and with the in-service scholarship recipients. Noyce Scholars as professionals will have the opportunity to participate in regional and national educational conferences and site visits to high-need schools, further engaging them in authentic teaching-related experience. Noyce Scholars will continue their development during their student teaching course in which they will at one point take full responsibility for a classroom. They will benefit from three different types of mentors: STEM faculty mentors, Education faculty mentors, and in-service teacher mentors. In order to affect persistence of the Noyce Scholars as effective teachers in high-need school districts, the project will provide professional development activities offered by the NJCU College of Education through the first four years of the last cohort of Noyce Scholars' teaching careers. Ultimately, New Jersey public schools will benefit from 27 new committed, confident, and well-prepared STEM teachers who have a major in a STEM discipline and who are equipped with pedagogical approaches specifically designed to provide learning experiences to students from diverse backgrounds which lead to success.
