K 12 Teacher Professional Development Effectively Offered By Stem Faculty From A Research University

As part of an extensive University K-12 partnership program in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines, more than 20 faculty members at Clarkson University have developed and taught summer institutes and workshops for area middle and high school teachers. The goals of these interventions are to provide rigorous and state-of-the-art STEM content knowledge, to model effective and active teaching strategies, and to prepare the teachers to bring the new STEM content into their classrooms. The 5-day summer institutes provide rigorous content and hands-on activities for the teachers. The objective of this paper is to describe the development and assessment of the institutes. The design of the institutes was based on educational research that has documented key features of professional development and careful evaluation of prior professional development activities in the region. The optimal partnership was defined as one where teachers partner with working scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who have sophisticated equipment in laboratory work space, computing facilities and other resources of higher education. During the past two years, approximately 250 individuals attended 22 institutes; some of the teachers attended multiple offerings. The efficacy and impact of these institutes has been assessed through preand post content knowledge or capability tests, evaluation forms, and peer-review of lessons developed as an outcome of the institutes. For all institutes, evaluations indicated a statistically significant increase in STEM content knowledge and evaluations were remarkable. The transfer of this knowledge by the teachers into classroom lesson plans and activities, and the peer review of that outcome are on-going.