All incoming first-year, first-semester students at Â鶹´«Ã½ÔÚÏß must enroll in a one-credit New Student Seminar course. Students are enrolled into a college\/school specific section, which may further be major\/program specific (i.e., students majoring in biology will be enrolled in the same New Student Seminar sections). In the beginning of the Fall 2023 semester, I reached out to the instructors of our College of Science and Mathematics sections and requested a brief visit to have a discussion about STEM teacher education. Over the course of the semester, I was able to visit more than eighteen of our sections (twenty-three total) and have discussions with more than 600 students about the importance of (and opportunities in) STEM education.<\/p>\n
At each session, I began by asking students if they had ever thought about becoming a teacher? One maybe two hands would raise. I followed that up with some reflection questions. For example, I asked how many of them had ever been supported by a teacher? Inspired by a teacher? Encouraged by a teacher? Listened to\/heard by a teacher? How many had their interest in STEM begin with a teacher? As you can imagine, many, many more hands were raised. In fact, although I didn’t do an official count, almost all students in every section had their hand raised after the reflection questions. I felt it was important for the students to acknowledge the valuable roles teachers play in the lives of students.<\/p>\n
I then went on to discuss career opportunities available to students who enroll in and graduate from a STEM TE program and busting many of the myths they’ve heard about the profession. Students received a handout (developed by GFO) that included average salaries, housing costs, etc. for some of our surrounding districts. We engaged in a dialogue about teachers’ level of satisfaction with their lives, available scholarships to assist with educational costs, number of vacancies, job security, opportunities for paid professional development and more.<\/p>\n
In the coming fall term, we will more fully develop our outreach plan, with the goal of visiting each of our New Student Seminar course sections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In their Voices from the Field section Dean Weir outlined how she uses GFO resources to encourage STEM teaching to incoming freshman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":212217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212218,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212216\/revisions\/212218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}