Evaluation of a Noyce program: Development of teacher leaders in STEM education.

The development of teacher leaders in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics has become a focus as demand grows on the national scale to improve student learning in these disciplines. As teachers' role in leadership continues to be redefined, research and professional development in teacher leadership will continue to evolve. Given the lack of a clear conceptualization of teacher leadership in the empirical literature, there is a clear methodological challenge for evaluators who are charged with assessing the impact of teacher leadership professional development programs. This paper describes how both the Utilization-Focused Evaluation and Theory-Driven Evaluation frameworks were used concurrently to design evaluation methods that were effective for assessing the impact of a dynamic teacher leadership program. The evaluation is specifically situated within the context of a Robert Noyce Scholarship Program, which aimed to grow veteran science teachers into teacher leaders. The paper describes how the evaluation frameworks used guided the evaluation methods, provides illustrative evaluation results, and states lessons learned from the author's experiences working within this context. This paper aims to provide an example of evaluation methods that could be replicated by evaluators' working within a Noyce or teacher leadership context.

Setting a Standard for Chemistry Education in the Next Generation: A Retrosynthetic Analysis.

A diverse and highly qualified chemistry teaching workforce is critical for preparing equally diverse, qualified STEM professionals. Here, we analyze National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) data to provide a demographic comparison of the U.S. secondary chemistry teaching population in high-needs and non-high-needs public schools as well as private schools during the 2011-2012 academic year. Our analysis reveals that the chemistry teaching workforce is predominantly white and significantly lacks in-field degrees or certification across school types, though high-needs and private schools are most affected by this lack of teacher qualification. Given these results, we attempt to retrosynthetically identify the pathway yielding a qualified chemistry teaching workforce to draw attention to the various steps in this scheme where reform efforts on the part of individual faculty, academic institutions, and organizations can be concentrated.