The diversity gap that exists in K-12 classrooms has no signs of diminishing unless we do something very different, at scale. Without this change, we are reinforcing an education structure that is not serving all students and has huge impacts on the diversity of all other sectors of our workforce. This Project Team's goal was to explore recruitment and pre-service support strategies to increase the diversity of the STEM teacher pipeline that are scalable and sustainable. 

In 2019, the outcome of their work was a public website that is meant to be an on-going repository of best practices and profiles of those on the group implementing those strategies.  Members of this team included Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, National Center for Teacher Residencies, UC Santa Barbara, Teaching Channel, TNTP, University System of Maryland, and Western Governors University. 

In 2020, the team continued to build on foundational work that was previously completed by the 2019 team, by collecting resources, exploring new strategies, and hosting a virtual conference for organizations committed to teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention to come together discuss barriers within marketing, financial challenges, and biases in recruitment and selection.

Watch the recording of this conference here, which includes opening remarks by the Project Team’s leader, Dewayne Morgan of University System of Maryland, and the keynote speaker, Dr. Roy Jones of Clemson University's Call Me MISTER® Program. (Note: the recording does not include the individual breakout sessions where participants went deeper into each focus area.)

If you would like to contact the team, please reach out to: Dewayne Morgan (P-20 Director, University System of Maryland).