Building Capacity for the Engineers to Teachers Program

University Of Wisconsin-Platteville, Platteville WI

Investigators

Abstract

The Engineers to Teachers (E2Teach) project at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville will use Capacity Building funds from the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program to directly address the national need for more STEM teachers in high-need rural school districts. The project team will establish an Applied Physics major at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and create an Engineers to Teachers (E2Teach) program with pathways, known as off-ramps, from undergraduate engineering degrees to marketable STEM teaching degrees. These off-ramps will prepare exemplary STEM majors to become highly qualified STEM teachers in high need districts who bring the hands-on, mathematically rigorous experience of upper-division engineering courses to the high school classroom. Students graduating from these programs will be highly marketable given that they will receive mathematics or physics certification, both areas for which school districts have expressed concerns about the supply of qualified teachers. The University of Wisconsin-Platteville will establish a partnership with Southwest Wisconsin Technical College and Western Technical College in this Capacity Building project. The goal of the project will be to implement a successful Noyce Scholarship program (E2Teach) at UW-Platteville to meet the significant and growing need for STEM teachers in high-need and underserved rural districts. As such, the project team will solicit input from constituents and stakeholders; conduct a comprehensive assessment of the demand for STEM teachers in the Tri-State region (Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa); examine and streamline curricula to create accessible pathways for engineering students into STEM education degrees with as much overlap with engineering degrees as possible; and design and market the E2Teach program.