Teacher Preparation in Partnership with UNF
Over $4,000,000 in funding has been awarded to UNF, in partnership with DCPS and STEM2 Hub through a highly competitive grant from the US Department of Education to formalize and study teacher preparation to bring STEM into early childhood learning, thus setting the stage for system - changing best practices! The notion of an early childhood STEM+C classroom brings to mind a vision of young students in small groups, engaged in playful standards - driven exploration with a variety of manipulative materials, robots, building blocks and other tech toys. The young learners, informally stationed around the room, are carefully investigating the process needed for building a new home for a story character. Some are building content knowledge through direct teacher instruction on measurement standards. Others are engaged in creating a vehicle that can move their building materials to the imaginative construction site. Others are testing their structures by collecting and analyzing data. Some are exploring books in the literacy area on the subject related to the work the vehicle performs, while others are writing a sequel to the original story using the new home they have created. As they apply an increasingly varied range of student - led learning, they develop self - regulation, persistence, and collaboration through lively discussion with classmates. Now consider the teacher working to support student learning in this environment. What skills, knowledge, and dispositions does this teacher need to scaffold student learning, redirect misconceptions in math and science, and lay the foundation for critical computational thinking skills that young children will need to successfully move from early childhood into the challenging content needed to innovate and solve the problems they will face as adults? Most teachers in preK - 2 classrooms today are not equipped to teach in this learning environment. Deficits in teacher content knowledge in math and science persist, and few teachers have adequate exposure to computational thinking. The effect of these deficits is too often reflected in student achievement, especially in the most challenged and underserved communities. This project will strengthen teachers and lead to broad outcomes! One of the most significant outcomes of this work has been the collaboration between the College of Education and the College of Computer Science to develop programs that strengthen preservice teacher programs to begin introducing computational thinking, coding, and computer science to our future teachers before they graduate! This will strengthen our teacher workforce and represents a system - wide shift in teacher preparation.
STEM2 HUB ANNUAL REPORT ◊ 23
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