What’s Next for STEM Education? Boosting Teachers and Teaching, PreK-12

There is a national consensus that today’s students need more opportunities to build skills in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) across the PreK-12 grade span. Teachers are a critical piece for providing those opportunities, but barriers abound. How are teachers recruited? How are they trained? Should education schools approach preparation differently? And what about educators in the early grades, kindergarten, and pre-K? What stands in the way of enabling high-quality STEM teaching and learning experiences for young children?

100Kin10’s efforts to name and map the grand challenges in STEM teaching are providing insights and recommendations for tackling these questions. So are two new reports: STEM Starts Early: Grounding Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education in Early Childhood, published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and New America with support from the National Science Foundation, and Can UTeach? Assessing the Relative Effectiveness of STEM Teachers, published by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), a program of the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

New America, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, AIR, and 100Kin10 convened STEM experts for a wide-ranging discussion of the ideas emerging from these reports and initiatives—and what they mean for policy making at the local, state, and federal levels.

Continue the conversation online with #STEMTeachers and following @NewAmericaEd, @NewAmerica, @Education_AIR, @CooneyCenter, and @100Kin10.