A national program that recruits and prepares individuals with STEM expertise for teaching at the secondary level is gaining ground. A new EdWeek story notes that the program now supports fellows in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, and aims to add another five to seven participating states in coming years.
Another key goal of the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowships program is nothing less than to transform university-based teacher preparation, with an emphasis on extensive clinical experiences in public school classrooms, akin to the training doctors receive.
As you might imagine, this is by no means the only initiative to get STEM experts into the classroom. In fact, EdWeek has featured others. Earlier this year, I wrote about Math For America, a fellowship program that seeks out people who “know and love math” and prepares them for careers as math teachers in secondary schools. (Despite the name, the organization is also starting to recruit science teachers.)
And several years ago, EdWeek profiled Uteach, a teacher preparation program first developed and launched at the University of Texas at Austin. UTeach, which also focuses on math and science teachers, has been replicated by a variety of universities around the country. In fact, a number of states that won grants under the federal Race to the Top program are using some of that money to replicate the UTeach model, including Tennessee and Georgia.