Examining the STEM education ecosystem

The world of STEM education, just like in every ecosystem there is a connection between everything therefore no one program can solve the reason it's so difficult to find and retain top teachers, particularly in STEM. However, everything isn't necessarily connected, so fixing certain issues may be more sweeping than dealing with other issues. This may sound obvious however it doesn't necessarily guide how we approach solving social problems. Surprised, we discovered that every one of the big issues has at the very the very least one root cause, with enormous potential to help improve the system overall and move closer to attracting and retaining top STEM educators.

STEM educators from elementary schools:teacher preparation faculty with special expertise in elementary STEM Professional development: greater teacher collaboration and professional development throughout the school day teacher leadership teachers who help to create positive working environments Materials for instruction:districts"identification of the best engineering education curriculum Value of science, tech as well as engineering an increase in the number of and variety of STEM-related classes required at high schools The network approach to problem-mapping enabled us to combine thousands of different and knowledgeable perspectives into a unified and usable map of our common understanding of the implications. The map suggests the possibility of a new model to address social change: Instead of trying to deal with the symptoms, we could make use of the network's insights to pinpoint and treat primary causes. Instead of hundreds of projects operating independently using the trust, commitment, and collective knowledge that the networks provide to concentrate on the issues that have the greatest leverage. For example, each of the 280 major organizations are part of 100Kin10 spans the nonprofit, education, and corporate sectors (organizations like AT&T as well as The National Science Teachers Association, UTeach at the University of Texas along with the US Department of Energy) indicated which of the reasons they focused on. We made this information available to ensure that every organisation could discover allies and work together. We also asked for research from top researchers and doctoral students. We also identified areas where we had already made progress by creating a public database with suggestions and solutions available for all to benefit from. In 2018, 100 people formed themselves into "project teams" to work on 13 issues, including the lack of teachers trained to address the unique challenges faced by the rural school (solution: supporting STEM education in rural communities) and the percentage of people who view STEM teaching as a rigorous and intellectually demanding career (solution: improving professors perceptions about their STEM education profession). The teams collaborate over six-month time frames to reach an objective that will help in solving the problem. The team working on rural issues is creating a toolkit for encouraging rural communities to participate in STEM and incorporating success experiences from STEM studying in rural environments. Perceptions is working on an informational booklet that provides evidence-based tips to help recruit undergraduate professors (surprisingly powerful influencers of STEM students) to promote STEM teaching. 100Kin10 builds upon the groundbreaking work of others who have made efforts to integrate ecological and network sciences to social issues. The project We the Data, a collaboration between Intel Labs and a group of TED fellows, shrewdly adopted the same approach to the issue of privacy and personal data and The Hewlett Foundation partnered with Kumu to create a map of Congressional gridlock. The study of the structural network has been used successfully to study how to improve the resistance of community members to the effects of climate change. In each of these instances the teams who were working on these issues realized they had to create an understanding of the issue and identify the ecosystem of the problem before they could start making real changes.