In 2007, Indiana adopted a new teaching fellowship program, established by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, to recruit professionals with STEM expertise. Fellows, whether mid-career or fresh out of college, were set to work in secondary schools serving disadvantaged populations. The program seeks to not only address the shortage of STEM teachers, but to change university-based teacher preparation to resemble the residency-type training doctors receive.
Michigan and Ohio adopted the fellowship programs this year, announcing the first sets of fellows this spring. Each participant earns a teaching certificate and a master’s degree and receives a $30,000 scholarship. In return, fellows commit to teaching for three years in a high-needs school (schools with a significant percentage of students at risk of academic failure).
Fellows typically work in schools several days a week for a full academic year with increasing teaching duties as the year progresses. A benefit of this set-up, says fellow Jeremy Sebens, is that “you could take the theory you’re learning and apply it the very next day and come back and say, ‘Hey this worked great,’ or ‘It didn’t work at all.’” Another fellow, Hwa Y. Tsu, noted that he has now seen “how the classroom gets set up, how they deal with establishing culture, establishing expectations, rather than student-teaching where I drop in for six weeks and then I drop out.”
The fellowship program came in response to calls for intensive recruitment for STEM teachers. President Obama has even weighed in, calling for the recruitment of 100,000 STEM teachers over the next decade. The Woodrow Wilson program is only one among a growing number of ventures to tackle this problem. This program now involves 17 universities across Indiana, Michigan and Ohio; to date, 349 fellows have been admitted, including the 211 named this spring.
The program is not intended to impose “a cookie cutter design,” but there are central elements that the foundation expects. The programs must be “truly clinically based,” and the design and implementation of the programs must be a genuine partnership between a university’s education school, college of arts and sciences (and engineering school, if applicable), as well as with local school districts. Another element is ongoing mentorship from experienced teachers that continues throughout the fellows’ three-year teaching obligation.
To read more, please visit http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/07/13/36stem_ep.h30.html?tkn=VXWFKvT8VFk%2FmTUd2sTNp7evrUDRH3H2EIfh&cmp=clp-edweek
