Participant Support: Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program Track 2 Project: Kentucky Teachers Improving Education in STEM

This 6-year Noyce Track 2 “K-TIES: Kentucky Teachers Improving Education in STEM” proposal is designed to attract mathematics and science majors to pursue a secondary teaching career. If funded, Teaching Fellows (TFs), would be provided financial support for their master’s degree and would also receive a yearly stipend during the first four years of teaching. Students in this program would complete the Master’s of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program in Secondary STEM Education at the University of Kentucky (UK), which is a one-year fulltime program we began offering fall 2018. We plan to recruit highly talented graduates from B.S. / B.A. programs in mathematics and science as well as career changers (who have a STEM undergraduate degree). This project is a collaborative effort between UK’s College of Arts & Sciences, College of Education, Fayette County Public Schools, and local businesses and informal STEM learning entities. Fellows are provided a one-year $12,000 scholarship and a stipend of $10,000 during their time in the MAT in Secondary STEM Education program. Fellows are then allotted a $10,000 stipend each year for the four years after their completion of the one-year MAT program as they begin their role as an inservice teacher while continuing to participate in K-TIES. They will receive professional development (PD) and mentoring during the summers and academic year through all five years in the program. The PD and mentoring will have special focus on culturally responsive pedagogy. We will use the Professional Career Continuum for Teachers (NBPTS, 2016) and Fisher and Royster’s Hierarchy of Teachers’ Needs (2016) framework to guide our program and PD. We plan to recruit two cohorts; 7 candidates for our 2025-2026 cohort and 8 candidates for our 2026-2027 cohort. The TFs will begin this program as pre-service teachers, and with our proposed grant organization and framework, we will use a novel professional learning (PL) trajectory to meet our main goal of transitioning these individuals through the novice teacher stage into professional teachers. Intellectual Merit: Fifteen K-TIES Teacher Fellows (TFs) will transition into teacher leaders as they matriculate through the novel K-TIES program that utilizes the Hierarchy of Teachers’ Needs framework integrated with culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP). Within this model, candidates evolve from pre-service teacher to professional teacher, develop a deep understanding of STEM content and pedagogy in multiple contexts, and tap into the social and cultural capital of their students and their community partners (e.g., Living Arts and Science Center, Newton’s Attic, the Arboretum) to develop worthwhile and meaningful STEM learning experiences. Examining the effectiveness of our K-TIES model in terms of how well professional teachers are produced and retained and developed will add to the STEM Education research literature. In addition to this, our K-TIES program can be replicated nationwide. The transformative aspects of K-TIES will produce learners with a more profound understanding of STEM as well as a more complete appreciation for mathematical, technological, and engineering applications and their connection to community and industrial problems. K-TIES will also serve to transform teacher practice by modeling this optimal form of instruction and propel teachers to achieve their fullest potential, which will ultimately and irreversibly alter future educational best practices. Broader Impacts: Training 15 K-TIES TFs (7 TFs year 1 and adding 8 TFs year 2) where mentors, faculty, and partners work with each of them closely over a five-year period will influence the TFs’ students. Seven TFs will begin teaching STEM students by year two and 15 TFs (total) will be teaching by year three of the K-TIES grant. By year six of K-TIES, the two cohorts of TFs will have engaged over 6,000 students in state-of-the-art, research-based, culturally responsive teaching (face-to-face and virtual). We also plan to conduct research on the effectiveness of our K-TIES program comparing our in-service TFs and their students with other teachers and their students (of similar demographics). Results of this research will be disseminated to the global learning community. The K-TIES program, curricula and related products will help to change teaching and learning methodologies in science, engineering, and mathematics contexts.