University of Bridgeport (UB), in partnership with neighboring high-need school districts (Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Stamford) proposes to engage in a highly effective Capacity Building Project leading to the design of a combined Teaching Fellowship/Master Teaching Fellowship (TF/MTF) program. The investigators are developing a program to recruit, prepare, and retain secondary science teachers committed to teaching physical science in high-need school districts in urban Southwestern Connecticut. The project is developing the capacity to recruit ten TFs from UB's student body preparing to graduate in science-related and five MTFs from in-service secondary science teachers who already serve in partner school districts.
The project supports the advancement of discovery through the identification of effective ways of recruiting, preparing, and retaining high-school science teachers in urban high-poverty settings, ultimately leading to enriched and effective learning experiences of underrepresented students in science, and their consequent increased recruitment into science-related careers. In addition, the project is providing essential information for practitioners and scholars by analyzing the practices of expert science teachers who are successful in high-poverty urban school districts, and making their images public (presentation at national conferences and publication in peer-reviewed journals). Third, the benefits of the project to society consist in the potential applications of these findings at a larger scale. As such, it serves as a model of science education improvement in high-need schools for adoption by other teacher preparation institutions nationwide.
