Our Developing STEM Master Teachers to Lead Digital Conversion in K-12 Schools project, supported by a 2018 award from NSF’s Noyce Master Teaching Fellowship (MTF) program, was little more than a year underway when COVID-19 hit, causing a major crisis across K-12 education.  In Spring 2020, our 21 fellows were just completing the first component of this 5-year program, which focused on preparing them to leverage the potential of digital technologies to support inquiry-oriented teaching in their own STEM classrooms (featured in the 2020 video #1843). During summer 2020, as originally planned, the program began to focus on developing our fellows’ skills and identities as leaders beyond their classrooms.  However, restrictions imposed by social distancing and new demands for our fellows’ emerging expertise on instructional technology called for changed expectations for our fellows, and thus also some important modifications in our original plan. 

In this video, we feature the stories of a few of these emerging instructional leaders, reporting on the diverse roles they were asked to play in different districts, how our project as well as their administrators supported them in these roles, and the impact these early leadership experiences had on their schools as well as their own leadership development.  We will also draw from this unique experience more general implications about the impact that a major crisis may have for developing leaders and the preparation of future educational leaders.

NSF Awards: 1758243

Presented in: 2021 (see original presentation & discussion)