The Educators' Equity (EE) STEM Academy aims to enhance recruitment and academic success of women and underrepresented students in technician education STEM courses and programs by providing professional growth opportunities for community college faculty and secondary teachers. The National Alliance for Partnership in Equity Education Foundation (NAPEEF), together with the Community College of Baltimore County, Baltimore County Public Schools and two regionally-based ATE Centers, created the EE-STEM Academy project to deliver 5 days of rigorous instruction, plus a year of facilitated coaching and high quality resources to improve classroom pedagogy. The 20-50 educators who participate each year customize and implement the strategies and tools in their classrooms, ones that they have designed to have a direct positive impact on student outcomes in STEM technician programs in engineering and IT. The materials and methods featured in the project include the following effective, research-based practices: 1) delivery of face-to-face and on-line rigorous training content, resources, tools, and strategies focused on micro-messaging, gender, and diversity in STEM; 2) incorporation of NAPEEF's Five Step Program Improvement Process for continuous educator feedback, peer support, and program revision; 3) building of professional learning communities to engage and support participants; 4) provision of peer-coaching training to build the network of educator learning and support; and 5) collection of quantitative and qualitative data that describe the impact on student performance for dissemination through technical education channels and journal publication.
Intellectual Merit: EE-STEM adapts research-based instructional materials and strategies originally developed and delivered to physics teachers in the Dallas Independent School District, which resulted in significant increases in the physics pass rate for girls and in the number of girls taking the AP Physics exam. With input from leading content experts in STEM technician education, NAPEEF adapts and enhances this curriculum to improve faculty pedagogy and assure improvements in student outcomes among a diversity of young women and underrepresented groups in targeted technician programs, and in the common core classes that serve the programs' educational pipeline.
Broader Impacts: The EE-STEM Academy engages educators to create customized strategies unique to their diverse population's needs by making them aware of the implicit biases that we all have and which cause inequities in the classroom. Educators collectively and individually select, develop, and evaluate currently available pedagogical tools, resources, and strategies as applied to their specific programs in order to improve student outcomes. NAPEEF distributes the resulting products and services through its national distribution network of 40 state education agencies and community colleges. It is anticipated that results of the initial offerings of this adapted effective practice program will be the understanding of its impact for implementation in all STEM technician programs of study in the U.S.
