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An increasing body of work is exploring mentoring within contexts that go beyond traditional one-on-one mentoring, including learning communities and mentoring circles. Research indicates that these alternative forms of mentoring better support all faculty, including those whose identities tend to lead to isolation in STEM: BIPOC faculty, women, and LGBTQ+. Group mentoring approaches can address multiple facets of the mentee(s) as a whole person in an efficient manner. Cross-Institutional Mentoring Communities (CIMCs) were designed to create networks of mentoring as a support and feedback mechanism for faculty who may also face challenges related to their personal characteristics and/or specific identities, especially intersectional identities traditionally underrepresented in STEM, or simultaneous demands of an academic career and caregiving responsibilities. Communities were formed with two to three junior and/or mid-career faculty and one or two senior mentors from four midwestern institutions. With the goal of retention at the forefront, quantitative and qualitative assessments of the CIMCs were designed to enable formative feedback to guide improvements to the CIMC support network and further implementation phases. While it was not originally the intent, the CIMCs also provided an opportunity to more deeply examine how the pandemic impacted women faculty with identities that compound disadvantage. Virtual meetings were held at roughly bimonthly intervals. Mentors were regularly provided guidance on mentoring and topics to discuss with their mentoring groups. While the pandemic impacted the original timeline and topical foci of the CIMCs, the virtual format of the CIMCs provided an opportunity to offer resources to assist faculty in navigating these unprecedented challenges: CIMC mentors and groups followed a "just in time" format with topics introduced and addressed responsively. 

This paper describes the development and implementation of a Cross-Institutional Mentoring Communities (CIMC) program. CIMCs were designed to create networks of mentoring as a robust support and feedback mechanism for faculty facing compounded challenges related to their personal characteristics and/or specific identities, especially intersectional identities traditionally underrepresented in STEM (e.g., women of color, LGBTQIA+ faculty, faculty with disabilities), or simultaneous demands of an academic career and family caregiving responsibilities. Communities were formed with two to three junior and/or mid-career faculty, women, and men, from four midwestern institutions; each CIMC was facilitated by one or two more senior mentors. Virtual meetings were held at roughly bimonthly intervals. Mentors were regularly provided guidance on mentoring and topics to discuss with their mentoring groups. The CIMC networks facilitated career obstacle problem-solving, as well as enhanced a sense of community and belonging. The program worked to reduce the isolation, exclusion, and silencing of non-majority individuals within the typical academic career progression in addition to adapting to support during pandemic-altered faculty challenges. Key advantages of CIMCs included enabling inter-institutional exchanges and reflective learning among committee members about similarities and differences in climate and opportunities on different campuses. This paper will review the premise and literature on peer and peer-plus mentoring as well as describe the process of forming and supporting the CIMCs. Formative assessments for this ongoing program will also be discussed. This paper can serve as a guide for other institutions to form communities of support for diverse faculty. 

Integrated approaches to teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (commonly referred to as STEM education) in K-12 classrooms have resulted in a growing number of teachers incorporating engineering in their science classrooms. Such changes are a result of shifts in science standards to include engineering as evidenced by the Next Generation Science Standards. To date, 20 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the NGSS and another 24 have adopted standards based on the Framework for K-12 Science Education. Despite the increased presence of engineering and integrated STEM education in K-12 education, there are several concerns to consider. One concern is the limited availability of observation instruments appropriate for instruction where multiple STEM disciplines are present and integrated with one another. Addressing this concern requires the development of a new observation instrument, designed with integrated STEM instruction in mind. An instrument such as this has implications for both research and practice. For example, research using this instrument could help educators compare integrated STEM instruction across grade bands. Additionally, this tool could be useful in the preparation of pre-service teachers and professional development of in-service teachers new to integrated STEM education and formative learning through professional learning communities or classroom coaching. The work presented here describes in detail the development of an integrated STEM observation instrument - the STEM Observation Protocol (STEM-OP) - that can be used for both research and practice. Over a period of approximately 18-months, a team of STEM educators and educational researchers developed a 10-item integrated STEM observation instrument for use in K-12 science and engineering classrooms. The process of developing the STEM-OP began with establishing a conceptual framework, drawing on the integrated STEM research literature, national standards documents, and frameworks for both K-12 engineering education and integrated STEM education. As part of the instrument development process, the project team had access to over 2000 classroom videos where integrated STEM education took place. Initial analysis of a selection of these videos helped the project team write a preliminary draft instrument consisting of 79 items. Through several rounds of revisions, including the construction of detailed scoring levels of the items and collapsing of items that significantly overlapped, and piloting of the instrument for usability, items were added, edited, and/or removed for various reasons. These reasons included issues concerning the intricacy of the observed phenomenon or the item not being specific to integrated STEM education (e.g., questioning). In its final form, the STEM-OP consists of 10 items, each comprising four descriptive levels. Each item is also accompanied by a set of user guidelines, which have been refined by the project team as a result of piloting the instrument and reviewed by external experts in the field. The instrument has shown to be reliable with the project team and further validation is underway. The STEM-OP will be of use to a wide variety of educators and educational researchers looking to understand the implementation of integrated STEM education in K-12 science and engineering classrooms.