How STEM Faculty and K-12 Teachers in the US Virgin Islands Found Support During a Pandemic
By Nadia Monrose Mills, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of the Virgin Islands
The Virgin Islands Institute for STEM Education Research and Practice, VI-ISERP, is a vibrant intellectual center dedicated to improving STEM education in the Virgin Islands through research, networking, and innovation. The goals of the center are to:
Improve STEM Education in the territory,
Integrate research and service learning into the undergraduate STEM curriculum,
Train junior faculty to become mentors through a formal mentoring program, and to
Conduct STEM education research.
The goal to improve STEM education in the territory is based on a need to improve the STEM workforce capacity in the US Virgin Islands. The STEM Institute, led by two faculty members in the US Virgin Islands mathematics department, was created to provide professional development for practicing K-12 STEM teachers. This center has been providing learning and training opportunities for teachers since 2016, serving over 100 teachers in the territory and impacting over 4,000 students.
The STEM Institute’s professional development initiatives utilize the Job Experience Professional Development (JEPD) model as a framework for long-term support for teachers. The JEPD model requires that teachers engage in activities that come from local problems with the support of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) — solely among teachers — to improve teachers’ content mastery, teaching practice, and student learning. The JEPD model, modified for the Virgin Islands, expands beyond the traditional definition of PLCs to include the University of the Virgin Islands’ (UVI) research and teaching faculty and local industry STEM professionals as partners. Using this structure, the STEM Institute promotes collaboration and reflection that creates opportunities for the development of synergistic, multi-level PLCs. Through summer workshops, action research classes, a newly added certificate program, and additional yearlong training, teachers develop Project-Based Learning (PBL) units centered around on-going research with faculty, formal community partnerships, and guidance from VI-ISERP educational researchers. Problems, such as marine debris, invasive lionfish management, water quality, renewable energy, and green home design necessitate interdisciplinary approaches, and scientific modeling processes have been addressed in these diverse teams. Such integrative partnerships have helped teachers establish networks that allow access to STEM expertise and (university) collaborators to address real-time issues.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the interruption of the 2020-2021 school year provided the STEM Institute’s leadership team with an opportunity to rethink how to best support our teachers during this abrupt transition to online learning. Drawing inspiration from our own needs as university faculty with limited online teaching experience, we knew we needed to continue the partnership with our teachers and support them in navigating through these uncharted waters, addressing unique needs due to limited online teaching experience. To this end, we were able to continue our support during the summer through a 3-hour online training via Zoom. This was made possible through support from a local partnership with the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands (CFVI) and the Raymond Jones Fund. In addition to sessions on student engagement in the STEM classroom, online assessments, and a session on reducing stress and coping mechanisms, we were also able to provide our teachers with a year-long subscription to a math or science organization (such as the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics (NCTM) or National Science Teacher Association), styluses for use with a touchscreen device, and a $25 gift card to an office supply store. Teachers also had the opportunity to borrow technology equipment, such as laptops, iPad minis, and mobile Wi-Fi devices to support their online instruction.
The STEM Institute’s leadership made a determination about the best type of support teachers would need during the 2020-2021 academic school year based on the results from a need-based assessment. We focused on providing weekly social and emotional support sessions for our teachers, while still providing monthly training sessions on topics related to online instruction. To promote social and emotional wellness, we created Teacher Talk Fridays, a support group open to all teachers in the territory. These sessions occur every Friday afternoon for one hour during the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters. Teacher Talk Fridays are similar to the Mathematical Association of America’s (MAA) MAAthy Happy Hour, where teachers can discuss current topics of interest with their peers and have a sounding board for issues they are facing. As a result, no administrators or non-teaching staff are allowed. Teacher Talk Fridays are very informal, but we do provide structure to the sessions. The sessions begin with an ice breaker and/or a game, followed by a discussion of a topic, and ends with free talk, where teachers ask their peers for advice concerning an issue they may be facing. About 12-20 teachers attend, with new teachers joining each week. The sessions are lively and full of discussion and laughs, as teachers win prizes (electronic gift cards or just bragging rights) and discuss issues in breakout rooms and with the entire group. These sessions are breaking boundaries and allow for teachers to meet new teachers between the two districts and among teachers from parochial, private, and public schools. This has the potential to cultivate additional opportunities for collaboration when our professional development activities return in person.
Discussion topics for Teacher Talk Fridays are many times led by teachers within breakout rooms and also within the main room. For example, during the first session for the Spring 2021 semester, the teachers were asked to reflect on lessons learned in 2020 around personal/family, teaching, local and national community, and race/racism. During these discussions, teachers shared challenges with online instruction (decrease in student attendance and productivity) but also shared their triumphs, such as exciting online based activities (i.e. virtual field trips) and the use of new online tools (i.e., whiteboard.fi).
VI-ISERP was able to adopt this model for professional development during this COVID-19 pandemic. We have created a safe space for teachers to come and interact with their peers in fun and engaging activities as well as share their real struggles. Many teachers have shared that they “look forward to these meetings each week,” which confirms that we are providing a valuable experience for the teachers. In sum, to teach successfully during this pandemic, we not only needed to change and restructure our teaching, but we also needed to change and restructure how we deal with our social and emotional well-being.
I charge you to create or join a support group during this time. It could be through a professional organization, such as the American Mathematical Society, MAA, National Association of Mathematicians, NCTM, etc., or an informal group. You could invite other colleagues within or outside your department or reach out to high school teachers. Thriving as educators during this pandemic has required us to remain socially and emotionally engaged with our colleagues and community partners, so that we can do this great work of providing quality STEM teaching to our students.