Conference: Pivoting STEM Instructor Professional Development

This project aims to serve the national interest by organizing and holding a conference that builds capacity in instructor practice, student preparation and expectations, and interdisciplinary curriculum through training a national network of teaching developers. Participants will advance their professional practice in working within department and institutional systems, engaging multiple stakeholders in building and implementing STEM teaching professional development, and approaches and methodologies to encourage faculty adoption of educational techniques that support successful student outcomes. The conference will directly support teaching professional developers to revitalize teaching within higher education to be responsive to the ubiquitous generative artificial intelligence (AI), and shifting of the role and purpose of higher education in the American psyche. From an instructional perspective, this means the STEM instructor, course content, curriculum pathways, and students may all change, more or less at once. The proposed conference is innovative in that it brings together a cohort of teaching professional developers from rural, less resourced, and non-R1 institutions who know each other and have worked together in a prior NSF project. The proposed conference will support STEM instructor professional development and thereby support the national priority and goal of the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program. Prior work established a robust community of 544 facilitators at 165 unique institutions that support STEM faculty teaching development and who continue to lead teaching professional development at 2-year technical and community colleges, 4-year predominantly undergraduate and liberal arts schools, comprehensive universities, and research-intensive institutions. 57% of the institutions are rural. We anticipate that 50+ institutions will attend, whose facilitators will advance their teaching professional development, improving the practice of hundreds of STEM faculty who teach thousands of STEM students each year. The NSF IUSE Conference Program supports conference projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. 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.