STEM Teacher Leadership through Action Research in Rural Communities

This project aims to address the national need for highly effective STEM teacher leaders who can mentor and help retain high-quality STEM teachers in rural districts. The project will also support 16 STEM teacher leaders by offering an Ed.D. STEM degree program and professional development experiences that focus on improving STEM teaching and meeting the needs of students in rural districts. The project's components will enable high-achieving practicing teachers to engage in research that addresses local rural STEM learning issues and to disseminate the findings to the wider STEM education community. Anticipated outcomes of the project include a model of rural STEM teacher leadership and professional development that can be replicated in other regions to help retain strong STEM teachers and teacher leaders, who will ultimately develop strong STEM students. The STEM Teacher Leadership through Action Research in Rural Communities (STEM-TLAR2C) project involves partnerships with five school districts in South Carolina (Bamberg, Calhoun, Lee, Lexington 1, and Richland 1) and the nonprofit South Carolina Coalition for Mathematics and Science. The project's goals include developing 16 teacher leaders across the partner school districts and empowering those teachers as instructional leaders in rural districts. Based on research documenting effective STEM professional development for teachers, the project will provide a model for the development of STEM teacher leaders in rural school districts through a five-year professional development program. The project will include a three-year Ed.D. STEM program followed by a two-year Action Research Implementation program, with teacher leadership development and support infused throughout. The project's conceptual framework focuses on four areas of need for rural teachers: reducing teacher isolation, promoting effective STEM instruction, increasing persistence, and creating STEM instructional leaders. Those areas will be linked with research-based STEM teaching strategies that address each need, as well as evaluation methods that assess the effectiveness of each strategy. The evaluation of the project will be guided by the following questions: (1) How do rural STEM teacher leaders research and implement a problem of practice? (2) How does that implementation impact their school districts? (3) How does the work of the project impact the effectiveness and persistence of rural STEM teachers? This Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowship 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 supports experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the effectiveness and retention 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.