Giving Compass' Take:

• Linda Jacobson reports on the conversations that took place in 100Kin10 initiative’s annual summit which aimed to share information about best practices for addressing the causes of STEM teacher shortage. 

• How can you work to address the STEM shortage in your area? Where are STEM teachers needed most? 

• Learn how to support STEM education. 

School district administrators, teacher educators, foundation officials, and nonprofit and corporate leaders gathered at the San Diego Zoo to further their collaborative efforts to prepare more STEM teachers for the nation’s classrooms.

Participating in the 100Kin10 initiative’s annual summit, attendees shared their expertise and held discussions around “grand challenges,” such as teacher preparation and supporting teachers at the elementary level in teaching STEM content.

“The importance here is solving the crisis around our STEM teacher shortage,” said Larry Plank, director of K-12 STEM Education for the Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) in Florida, which brought a seven-member team, including a school board member, a parent advocate and a principal, to this year’s event. For years, he said, he would bring back what he had learned from the gathering, “but it’s hard to be a prophet in your own town.”

The event also comes as 100Kin10 announced that its partner organizations have trained or certified more than 68,000 STEM teachers toward the goal of preparing 100,000 by 2021.

Launched in 2011 and responding to a call former President Barack Obama issued in that year’s State of the Union address, the network began with 28 partner organizations and grew to 280 by 2016. This year, however, the organization will go through a new phase of accepting nominations and choosing partners. Talia Milgrom-Elcott, co-founder and executive director, described the work as climbing a mountain and thinking you’ve reached the top only to see that the top is farther ahead.

“The work transcends 100,000,” she said. “It needs to get to the root causes of why there’s a shortage.”

The event also came on the same day that the Economic Policy Institute released a papersuggesting the teacher shortage — a topic of growing debate — is more severe than other studies have found. While the authors don’t focus specifically on STEM teachers, they do note that when STEM teachers leave the profession, it’s often “for reasons that have to do with the wider availability of STEM-related opportunities outside of teaching in our economy.”

In HCPS, for example, Plank said he has learned that “workplace conditions look different for a STEM teacher” and can include feeling supported by administrators for incorporating STEM into the early grades and having the resources to get students out of the classroom for field trip experiences.

Having a mentor with STEM expertise can also increase a teacher’s effectiveness during the early years of his or her career, said Jenny Hicks, director of K-12 STEM Engagement as part of the Indiana STEM Initiative. Hicks works with 11 school districts to select teacher leaders as mentors for novice teachers at the K-8 level. After three years of the program, she’s found that students in the classes who have a mentee teacher perform academically as if they had a more experienced teacher.

Through 100Kin10, Hicks is now creating a mentoring framework and a professional development toolkit to share the model more broadly. She added for a mentoring program to be successful, district and school leaders have to “own it.”

Read the full article about addressing the STEM teacher shortage by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.