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Online professional development (PD) can reach teachers from widespread areas. Here, we describe PD activities that are part of a project focused on integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (iSTEM) teaching self-efficacy and effectiveness among early-career elementary teachers. Toward our objective of building a community of elementary teachers focused on improving their iSTEM teaching, we are conducting online PD institutes over four summers. These PD institutes are designed using Desimone’s five critical features of effective PD: content focus, active learning, coherence, duration, and collective participation. Our institutes engage teachers in an initial synchronous online session, which is followed by independent work time to put their learning into practice. It concludes with a final synchronous online session where teachers share their asynchronous work, receive feedback, and identify the next steps in enacting their learning in the classroom. Below we describe the first year’s PD activities.
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This content will become publicly available on January 29, 2026
Collaborative global learning within an integrated STEM professional development using children's literature
Elementary‐level teachers often express the need for assistance and support in teaching integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) lessons. Many lack content knowledge in these disciplines, and many also report a lack of adequate opportunities to teach these subjects during their preservice programs or their in‐service careers. We addressed this need by offering online professional development (PD) opportunities in integrated STEM, using model lessons that are anchored in the BSCS 5E instructional model, also known as the learning cycle. Our broader goal is to establish a professional learning community for both preservice and in‐service elementary teachers focused on integrated STEM education. We based our design and implementation of an engineering‐focused PD sequence on research literature, integrating STEM content areas and emphasizing key factors for maximizing impact, such as active learning, content focus, coherence, duration, and participant engagement. In this article, we outline the structure and describe the activities we conducted over the summer, which included elements of collaboration, interaction, and reflection. Our team also chose to incorporate picture books featuring international STEM role models, like Zaha Hadid, in the book titled The World is not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid by Jeannette Winter. The insights gained from this iteration of the PD will inform the planning of future online PD offerings for elementary teachers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2151045
- PAR ID:
- 10594275
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- School Science and Mathematics
- ISSN:
- 0036-6803
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Online professional development (PD) can reach teachers from widespread areas. Here, we describe PD activities that are part of a project focused on integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (iSTEM) teaching self-efficacy and effectiveness among early-career elementary teachers. Toward our objective of building a community of elementary teachers focused on improving their iSTEM teaching, we are conducting online PD institutes over four summers. These PD institutes are designed using Desimone’s five critical features of effective PD: content focus, active learning, coherence, duration, and collective participation. Our institutes engage teachers in an initial synchronous online session, which is followed by independent work time to put their learning into practice. It concludes with a final synchronous online session where teachers share their asynchronous work, receive feedback, and identify the next steps in enacting their learning in the classroom. Below we describe the first year’s PD activities.more » « less
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