Welcome to Get the Facts Out, a project that aims to help repair the reputation of the teaching profession and thereby inspire more people to become teachers of secondary STEM. Please join our growing community of practice at GettheFactsOut.org!

My name is David May, and I am the project manager for GFO (as we call it). I and our Principal Investigator Wendy Adams have spent many, many years working to improve STEM teacher preparation, and are very excited about the promise of this project for addressing the severe shortage of secondary STEM teachers.

Our research has found that many STEM faculty and others strongly value K-12 STEM teaching, yet:

1. underestimate teachers' salary and benefits,
2. drastically overestimate the starting salaries of other STEM occupations that require the same degree,
3. are not aware that about half of all undergraduate STEM majors have an interest in a teaching career, and
4. that there are research-based resources freely available for getting the facts about teaching out to college students, career changers, and those who mentor and advise them on career options.

Please keep in mind that many people have to dig into the data before they fully believe all of the facts that we present here. A fair amount of discussion of the data and what it means may also be necessary, because it runs counter to what the conventional wisdom is about how teachers fare in general.

That's why we would love for you to take part in this online discussion! If you can't for some reason but are still interested in learning more, please sign up for our periodic email newsletter (you can preview several issues first) and visit our website.

 

Hi David:  Our state legislature is beginning a study to look at why so many are leaving the profession! I am going to send some of your project materials to them. It's certainly known that the Covid pandemic was challenging for teachers and parents. Did it influence your data? We had a large turnover in school and district administrators as well!

Hi Barbara! Great question, and one we've been looking into for a while now. While teachers certainly have had it very rough, it turns out that even in the last two years they've been quitting at rates far lower than for people in other professions. Our evidence for this is from U.S. Dept. of Labor data as well as from some recent articles from ChalkBeat/AP, EdWeek, and The 74.

We know there is still a severe teacher shortage, especially in secondary STEM, and that it's getting worse. So we have our work cut out for us. And while business done by other professionals may have declined as the economy slumped, there's certainly no decline in the number of K-12 students who need teaching!

Thanks again for the question! I hope that's somewhat helpful. I don't know the specific numbers in NH, but that Labor data might have it.

 

The messaging of this campaign is on point! 

The resources available at the website (https://getthefactsout.org/) are numerous and include high quality, editable documents for programs to use as they see fit locally.  Administrators and recruiters will especially appreciate the quick data sheets that get at why STEM teaching as a profession is an important and viable career of choice.

GFO makes it so much easier for departments to take on and/or enhance their ongoing recruitment efforts!

Hello David!  This is wonderful! We have used several of your resources throughout the years that have helped us with our recruiting.  

Fascinating project! Based on your research and what you've learned, how can schools and districts improve their recruitment efforts especially as it concerns BIPOC STEM educators? 

I love the GFO materials for recruiting STEM teachers. They do a great job of directly addressing the misconceptions that a lot of students have about teaching. Using them has made my job much easier.

I am glad to hear that you are also working on the teacher retention issues. This really is becoming a crisis. I appreciate David's point that the rates of people leaving teaching are lower than some others, the bar to entering teaching is a lot higher than other professions (e.g. credential), so we can't replace teachers fast enough to meet the need.

Brian,

Thank you for the positive feedback!  On your second point, agreed!  We need to do more than add a student or two to our existing teacher prep programs. While that will certainly help, the shortage is larger than that! We're working on new resources to increase the numbers of students majoring in STEM for our next project.  We are also trying to reach career changers.  The problem is large enough that the solution must be multipronged.

Thank you for these wonderful materials! I have used the slides, posters, and customizable flyers.

Regarding teachers leaving the field, I wonder how valid and reliable some of the data we see in the media is. I am concerned that teachers who are considering leaving, may be persuaded to leave due by misleading media stories. 

 

For example, according to Analysis: There’s Lots of Education Data Out There — and It Can Be Misleading. Here Are 6 Questions to Ask | The 74 (the74million.org) 

under #5 "What is it measuring?"

... one of the most-cited statistics from a recent teachers union survey was that 29 percent of educators were considering leaving the profession. However, this was within a very specific context. When asked “How are you currently feeling about your work as an educator?” 7 of the 10 possible answers provided were negative — “stressed,” “overwhelmed,” “frustrated,” “worried,” “thinking about quitting or retiring,” “angry,” “worried about my own mental health.” Only three responses were positive: “happy,” “inspired” and “focused.” 

With 7 out of 10 negative options it is no wonder teaching has a bad reputation and teachers begin to consider changing careers. 

Thank you for this presentation. Yes there are many misconceptions about teaching that may (but should not!) discourage students from pursuing this wonderful profession! Do you have material (I will also check your website) on some of the day-to-day on why it is a great job/career - on what the job is like? What I mean is, that it is not a mundane desk job - you are active as you work with students and other faculty, every day is different and full of surprises, you get to see the smiles on students' faces when they learn something new -- capturing the joy of teaching itself :). 

Countering misinformation is a critical need these days.  Your project is addressing this need directly in a number of ways  and pointing a way forward for those who are entertaining the idea of teaching.  You are opening a welcoming door, and helping prospective teachers learn from a community of practice that can portray a more realistic and positive frame of reference.  When coupled with hands-on teaching experiences and supported by systems that are committed to enhancing the teaching professions, your efforts should contribute to an increased interest in and pursuit of teaching.  How are you measuring the influence of your efforts?  

This is amazing!  It ties into one of the things we are trying to do with our NOYCE Project.  I will be using the website.

Thank you for your video.  I am interested in science teacher recruitment and retention, and have listened to many pre-service science teachers describe how difficult it was for them to find out information about teaching.  I'm curious to know your thoughts on who is best positioned to share information about STEM teaching with undergraduate STEM majors - do you envision these presentations held by education faculty, by fellow STEM graduates who are pursuing teaching, or by science faculty (perhaps with interests in teaching)?  Should these presentations take place in STEM courses, or should it be part of an extracurricular event (and housed in STEM buildings or schools of ed?)?

Hi Ashley,

Yes!  All of the above:)  Our resources are designed with faculty in mind, originally faculty in STEM departments; but we are finding a large number of faculty from schools of education, particularly directors of teacher education programs who find the resources helpful for their work broadly, not just for STEM prospective teachers.  We also have student ambassadors at our institution who give these presentations to other students.  Another one of our resources is the "Data Handouts" and these contain the same data that is found in the presentations and are nice to use during a conversation with a student or a colleague.

On our "How to reach students" page, we list a range of venues and ways to share the facts at your institution.  https://getthefactsout.org/reach-students/

Sharing facts with any faculty and any students is helpful for shifting the culture so that a pre-service teacher doesn't feel the need to defend their career choice.  Sharing the facts with pre-service teachers is helpful for retention.  We often hear, "I was starting to question my choice, but now I'm solid after hearing this!"

 

GFO has great resources and has done a nice job keeping them up to date. I have used the presentations in my Exploration of Biology Teaching course with positive feedback from students. These are students who have already declared an interest in teaching Life Sciences. I am hoping this next Fall to be able to share this information with our intro majors' Biology courses to see if we can connect with students who may be a great fit for the profession. These resources are geared more toward physical sciences and math but have still been useful.  Thanks for the work you have put into this project.

Thank you! It's nice to hear how  you've used GFO:)

Great video! I'm planning to meet with STEM faculty this summer to help me with exposing STEM majors to a career in education. I've had a few STEM majors add an education minor in their junior year, so I would like to expose them earlier. Please provide any advice. Thanks!

This is a great video, and what you're doing is quite important! I'm curious to hear -- have you looked at the role of continued, or adult education and training opportunities for existing STEM teachers as a form of teacher retention? I'm interested to know what resources exist to ensure existing STEM teachers stay in the field as well as stay up-to-date in the field, and how effective these resources are. 

I've attended some virtual info/training sessions and registered as a GFO Champion. So far, I've just shared with colleagues, but we planning an organized campaign utilizing these resources and some local data that I requested that you all gather. Thanks so much for that!

But even without regional/local data, the fact that all the materials are customizable makes this a project that should and will have wide-ranging and long-lasting impacts. Everything looks classy in addition to providing much needed factual info, and those two features together will help seal the deal for many in the "yeah, but... I just don't know" phase!

I'm a GFO Champion, and I work with high school physics and chemistry teachers and TYC physics faculty nationwide. They KNOW who to encourage to become a high school teacher, and they have a lot of influence for their students. But they lack resources such as GFO can provide, but modified and simplified for their "quick" use from time to time in their classes, for reinforcement of encouragement during the school year. Can GFO query them as to what TYPES of resources will best serve them?

I'm responding to Liza Bondurant and Brian Foley, about STEM teachers leaving the field.  In greater Phoenix, we have 40 job openings in high school chemistry and physics, in public DISTRICT schools (and probably more in charter high schools and private/parochial high schools; I haven't had time to look at their websites). This is MANY more than usual. It is a crisis.  Yet the entire state of Arizona produces only about 8 new physics teachers each year, and about 16 new chemistry teachers.  Some Phoenix-area school districts (e.g., Casa Grande UHSD and Maricopa USD) hire STEM subject teachers from the Philippines and other Asian nations, on 'cultural exchange" visas, where they can stay here only 5 years. Casa Grande UHSD had 28 such teachers last year.

I respond to Maia Punksungka, who asked about teacher retention and staying up-to-date.  The demise of professional development for STEM subject teachers is alarming! This summer, only 25 multi-week Modeling Workshops will be held in physical, life, and computational sciences – down from 60 in 2017, due to demise of the two Federal grant programs for LOCAL teacher professional development.(They are listed at https://www.modelinginstruction.org )

Numerous physics teachers have written that professional development in Modeling Instruction saved their career!  Teachers wrote : “If I had not found the Modeling Instruction pedagogy, I would most likely left teaching by now because I was so discouraged with the mile-wide, inch-deep approach that I was using.”

 (More generally, K-12 science teacher professional development (PD) has declined in recent years. Horizon Research documented the decline; see Trends in U.S. Science Education from 2012 to 2018, by P. Sean Smith. 2020, Horizon Research, Inc. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED611301 )

Why has it declined? Because the Federal government ended 2 crucial PD programs, making PD much too expensive. Chief among the programs that served physics teachers was the U.S. Department of Education’s 2.5% set-aside for colleges in their formula Title II-A grants to each state. (That provided $1 million to Arizona each year, for subgrants for local teacher PD. The other program was the Math & Science Partnerships -- state formula grants that were subgranted to school districts. Impossible to use for HS physics & chemistry PD in most states.)

All of that is GONE. Now teachers nationwide must PAY typically $775 for a summer Modeling Workshop. It's unfair; wealthy private schools benefit -- and sometimes entire science departments transform -- but most PUBLIC schools are LEFT OUT.      Bottom line: How can we re-instate these 2 Federal programs for LOCAL science teacher PD?