Conference: Revolutionizing Teacher Supply + Demand, A Beyond100K Solution Lab

The project aims to serve the national need to generate solutions to the problem of ineffectively tracking the teacher workforce. States must be able to predict and prepare the teacher population needed to offer STEM courses relevant to students and to the future workforce to resolve the STEM teacher shortage. States must also be able to build a racially diverse teacher pipeline that reflects the diversity of their students to encourage the participation of underrepresented minority students in STEM fields. To address this issue, Beyond100K will host a workshop in Spring 2024, inviting state-level education office representatives from all fifty states, to launch the process of designing this tool. The design requirements for the tool and system and cohesion of an ecosystem that will lead efforts to transform how states collaborate to address and prevent STEM teacher vacancies are the proposed outcomes of this workshop. This tool will support states, districts, and teacher preparation programs to be able to predict and fulfill their STEM teacher workforce needs. This project at Beyond100K includes partnerships with the United States Department of Education as well as state departments of education. Project goals include determining the necessary components of a teacher pipeline tracking and projection tool and system and connecting local and national K-12 STEM ecosystem partners to resources for tracking and documenting K-12 STEM teacher pipeline changes. The conference will share bright spots from other sectors, highlight existing models from within K-12, and determine the design requirements for systems used for tracking K-12 STEM teacher recruitment with a focus on preparing and retaining teachers who represent the racial and ethnic diversity of their students. Research questions include: 1) What successes and challenges are states, districts, and others facing in understanding, projecting, and planning for teacher vacancies? 2) How can technology, AI, existing processes and data, and human-centered design principles be used to outline the specifications for a tool for understanding, projecting, and planning for teacher vacancies that meet the diverse needs of many states and school districts? This tool would ultimately enable states and localities to manage their human resource needs and develop targeted, data-driven strategies to respond to their teacher workforce needs and vacancies and unlock the potential for powerful data and learnings about the STEM-teacher pipeline. Conference outcomes and participant experience data will be collected in a narrative report and made available to the public on the project's website. 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.