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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 earlycareer 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. 

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. 

An Educational CAD Model Library (CAD Library) is being developed by collaborating educational associations affiliated with the National Technology Leadership Summit coalition. The CAD Library’s Curators’ Council has developed descriptive metadata fields that will be associated with each educational object published in the library. These fields are designed to facilitate search and discovery of objects by teachers who are increasingly well positioned to use these objects in their instruction due to the increasing presence of school-based makerspaces and the 3D printers, digital die cutters, and other fabrication tools. The publication of these metadata standards makes them available to the members of the educational associations participating in the development of the CAD Library and to other relevant stakeholders for feedback to inform ongoing revisions. 

Preservice teacher preparation programs and inservice professional development enhance science teaching self-efficacy. Research has shown that elementary teachers often have low self-efficacy for teaching science and engineering. However, there is less evidence surrounding engineering teaching self-efficacy. In this systematic review of literature, we explored the research question: What does the existing literature on self-efficacy reveal about fostering elementary teachers’ engineering teaching self-efficacy? We (1) synthesize the existing research on engineering teaching self-efficacy and (2) describe trends in research and uncover gaps that exist, including recommendations for future research. Among the 117 articles included in our full systematic review of science and engineering teaching self-efficacy, only 13 empirical studies focused specifically on engineering teaching self-efficacy. With a dearth of studies in both preservice and inservice contexts, there is a need for additional research on engineering teaching self-efficacy. In particular, longitudinal studies that track change over time and measure lasting effects of interventions. Further, detailed explorations of the factors that impact engineering teaching self-efficacy across multiple contexts are needed. Findings from these studies will help STEM educators to inform the design of preservice teacher education programs as well as inservice professional development opportunities.