Equity and Innovation in STEM Education Through Professional Development at a Community College

This project aims to serve the national interest by developing instructional practices that increase participation in and completion of STEM degrees at LaGuardia Community College. To accomplish this, a diverse cohort of faculty will engage in professional development activities and department level change initiatives that utilize coaching and mentoring strategies. The project intends to investigate the effectiveness of a cohort-based, two-tiered faculty development model that incorporates leadership training and data coaching on persistence in foundational STEM courses. The project fosters a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge-sharing that contributes to local and national practices in STEM education at two-year colleges. This project seeks to reduce learning outcome inequities by scaling data-informed, equity-minded practices across introductory STEM courses using the Shared Equity Leadership (SEL) framework. Four project objectives within this framework will be achieved: 1) scale equity-minded and data-informed actions through professional development, 2) leverage institutional strength to mobilize faculty for equitable change, 3) develop faculty leadership and build upon faculty's knowledge, and 4) foster continuous improvement and dissemination practices. An already successful data coaching pilot that leveraged the talent of LaGuardia's diverse faculty and student body provides the foundation to launch this project's activities. These activities include inquiry-guided faculty development, leadership training, open educational resource (OER) creation, and a mixed-methods evaluation of the impact of project interventions on faculty practices and student outcomes. Specifically, the assessment and evaluation plan utilize focus groups, equity-minded assessments of student belonging, and iterative analyses of disaggregated institutional student success data to support faculty leaders to refine and gauge the effectiveness of project interventions. To inform broader efforts around faculty leadership and educational development, project leaders aim to disseminate findings through conference presentations, peer-reviewed journal publications, OER design, and collaborations with the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC). The NSF IUSE: Innovation in Two-Year College STEM Education (ITYC) Program seeks to accelerate the impact of and advance knowledge about emerging and evidence-based practices in undergraduate STEM education at two-year colleges. 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.