Teacher leader engineering network (talent): A collective impact model for k-12 engineering teacher leaders (work in progress)

The Teacher Leader Engineering Network (TaLENt) is a working group of Teacher Fellows (TF's) with the overarching goal of increasing the number of Black, Native American, Hispanic, and female students pursuing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) degrees in college. The TaLENt project addresses this goal by engaging elementary, middle, and high school teachers from widely diverse backgrounds teaching in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms that are equally diverse. Divided into teams of five teachers of engineering for each school level, TF's are creating guidelines for quality engineering instruction. In turn, these guidelines are to be used by educators who want to incorporate engineering in their classrooms but have little experience with the field and minimal access to professional development ^[1]. While current support for such novice engineering teachers is often delivered in a "train-the-trainer" format using ready-made curricula, ^[2] TaLENt TF's are writing discrete sets of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART)^[3] criteria that will facilitate K-12 curricula development of customizable school-level engineering resource. TaLENt aims to support a generation of underrepresented pre-collegiate students who are positive about STEM and conversant in the fundamentals of engineering. In this work-in-progress paper, we review the current state of K-12 engineering education and contrast it with our approach to creating criteria for quality engineering instruction. We describe how our three working teams of engineering teachers were recruited and are going about the work of producing school-level specific SMART criteria. We highlight the role of collective impact practices in our methodology, and we outline some of the early outputs from our teams. The final deliverables will be available for use by K-12 engineering teachers across the United States, with specific distribution to National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) that support Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) programs.