Mentors First: Building Capacity to Develop STEM Teachers who Can Include English as a Second Language Instruction in their STEM Classes

Evergreen State College, Olympia WA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national need for experienced and aspiring STEM teachers who are prepared to integrate English as a second language (ESL) instructional practices into their teaching. High-quality STEM courses are rarely available to ESL students, in part because STEM educators are unlikely to be endorsed and prepared to integrate ESL practices in their STEM courses. Mentors First partnerships intend to build capacity to address language barriers in STEM courses in four ways: 1) monthly partnership development meetings that include building community, sharing data, planning course sequences and grants; 2) developing 9th grade through college dual language (English/Spanish) STEM courses; 3) disseminating and using project findings to identify, examine, and eliminate barriers to STEM course success for limited English proficient students; and 4) designing STEM+ESL mentor teacher training. This Capacity Building project at The Evergreen State College includes partnerships with STEM and ESL faculty at South Puget Sound Community College and the 44 high-need school districts in the Educational Service District 113 region surrounding the partner colleges. The Mentors First partnership’s goals are to collect, analyze, and use data to identify, understand, and remove barriers to STEM course trajectories for bilingual students attending high-need schools in the region. The project also aims to identify high-quality STEM mentor teachers to participate in the STEM+ESL Mentors First Fellows program. The Mentors First project and evaluation aims to advance knowledge of the institutional barriers for ESL students succeeding in STEM courses using Hierarchical Linear Modeling to examine the nested effects of ESL students in classrooms and schools with/out ESL endorsed teachers. The long-range goals include development of a STEM+ESL Mentors First program enhanced by an aspiring STEM+ESL teacher program. If ESL students have high-quality STEM teachers with language strategies that welcome and support them, it may be possible for them to imagine a STEM career for themselves. As a result, this project has the potential to broaden participation in STEM fields. This Capacity Building project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 STEM teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the persistence, retention, and effectiveness of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.