Alternate Spring Break Opportunity to Encourage College Students to Consider Teaching STEM

The STEM Teacher Recruitment Workgroup will pilot an alternative spring break, ASB, experience for undergraduate STEM majors from Johns Hopkins, Morgan State and Notre Dame Universities the week of March 16, 2020. The goal of this experience is to expose current undergraduate students to STEM classrooms in Baltimore City to encourage these students to consider teaching as a career option while serving their local community. Participants will include:

Post-secondary undergraduates who will co-teach with a STEM teacher during their college/university spring break. Students can be freshmen – seniors. The team will work to ensure that freshmen, if selected, are very mature and placed with an appropriate grade level based on their age and maturity.
Baltimore City Secondary STEM teachers including computer science (grades 7-12).

So far two middle schools and one high school have agreed to provide teachers to participate as mentors for undergraduate students. Our goal is to place 5 students with 5 teachers in the pilot year. We are in the process of applying for approval to award CPD units to participating teachers. Teachers would be required to attend a training and reflection meetings, participate in collaborative planning with an assigned undergraduate student and host the student in their science classroom for the week of March 16th, 2020.

Initial Workgroups Launched

The BmoreSTEM Ecosystem Launch on February 19, 2019 was a success. Thoughtful and enthusiastic input, demonstrated that all sectors are committed to contributing. Since then the planning committee and potential workgroup co-chairs have been working on determining what workgroups we can launch. Every workgroup had to address a significant need, have your support, and require cross-sector collaboration. BmoreSTEM is proud to announce our initial workgroups with the following objectives:

Create a registration, ticketing, and transportation system for curriculum-embedded STEM experiences that is user-friendly, centralized, and sustainable. Co-Chairs: Allison Burr-Livingstone & William Redmond
Create a program to increase the supply of secondary STEM teachers. Co-Chairs: Christian Anderson & Kia Boose
Develop BmoreSTEM 2.0 infrastructure and cultivate resources to make it sustainable. Co-Chairs: Rachel Duden (ex-oficio) & Myra Norton

Co-chairs will be forming workgroups and scheduling meetings. As the workgroups meet they will be narrowing and refining the objectives as they study possible strategies and metrics. These initial workgroups will demonstrate our ability to affect change as our ideas for additional, much-needed, workgroups continue to incubate. Additional workgroups will launch as ideas blossom and our capacity grows. Within the next 60 days we hope to announce an objective for a workforce development workgroup (co-chairs Mike Hinkey and Stan Wolfe). Please stay tuned to BmoreSTEM.net for updates on workgroups and feel free to reach out to co-chairs with suggestions, or to volunteer, as we all continue to figure out how we can best work together to develop STEM opportunities in Baltimore.