Strategic Staffing for STEM

Foothills Community School has one STEM Student Success Coach that has at least 50% of his time allocated to leading STEM education. The duties of this position currently include a STEM elective (which has had a focus of the design process and robotics), helping groups which have issues with a project, running the STEM lab classroom, coaching our FLL Robotics teams, coaching our Gravity Games teams, guiding groups as they participate in the American Rocketry Challenge, and being a liaison to the other schools in the county as we look to make a push to bring robotics back to every school in McDowell County.
All teachers at Foothills Community School are expected to be leaders within the STEM education realm, leading professional development and seeking opportunities for involvement in the greater educational community. As a staff, we have presented for the International Center for Leadership in Education and North Carolina Middle School Conference demonstrating what we do and why we do it. Foothills Community School recruits, hires and develops all teachers on the faculty to have high-quality STEM instructional skills. All teachers are also trained in Project-Based Learning following the Buck Institute Model for Project-Based Learning. Teachers are also engaged in the learning design process that follows the engineering design process or the computational thinking design. Teachers walk through this process each time they design a project and work to provide honest and open feedback to ensure that STEM skills are embedded throughout the project process.
The formal process and pathways to develop current and future teacher-leaders for STEM education are as follows: teacher goal setting, administrative coaching, network development (NCSTA, STEMWest, Pockets of Excellence, Bridging the Gap, etc) and teacher efficacy to develop and lead within the school, district, region, state/national. In recruiting staff, we ensure through our interview process that teachers can work together, have a diverse background of experiences and ensure that they have the insatiable curiosity of a lifelong learner to embrace the STEM design.

Evidence: Strategic Staffing for STEM

Examples of teacher leader work and training for STEM Education: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16l1HfOqPnb4XB-hDTEWjMSz6ssMuYoop?usp=sharinghttps://docs.google.com/document/d/104mQyT8w0XhVopSjcGI2cDrYm-8I9TlQmzcLbEjIIuY/edit?usp=sharinghttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1rJpyd16rfXN2O1PgJba8JOfv-TUtwY0Jw5i251DPxQw/edit?usp=sharinghttps://www.hmhco.com/blog/hmh-learning-moments-teachers-in-america-tracy-childers-marion-nchttps://twitter.com/STEMFCS/status/1176939834008465408https://twitter.com/STEMFCS/status/1175445998459662336https://twitter.com/STEMFCS/status/1155900363368738816https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pjQIami-36IYAXJUN4dV-k2q1D3DrCCY?usp=sharinghttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1F2WNLy4EGyT_Lsmmk5m2_xdRZtrnVkXzOEFd3sYgIwA/edit?usp=sharing