Teacher Leadership Program

Part of ASTA’s mission is to provide professional development opportunities for science teachers that will impact their teaching and ultimately increase student achievement.

With limited operational budgets, schools are challenged with the financial ability to provide focused professional development and dedicated coaches for their teachers. Teacher-leaders are essential change agents of reform that help provide teachers knowledge of content and pedagogy that supports inquiry-based learning. The impact of teacher-leaders is critical as they serve many roles in improving science teaching and learning. Among these critical roles, ASTA’s Teacher Leadership Program (TLP) will focus on the role of teacher-leaders as mentor to address the needs of pre-service teachers.

Teaming science teacher-leaders in a mentor role with pre-service teachers can support pre-service teachers as they clarify their role about what it means to teach science. Pre-service teachers have a variety of needs, such as curriculum alignment, classroom management, pedagogy including use of technology and interviewing for a teaching position. Research shows that new teachers are not staying in the profession due to a variety of issues, one being that they don’t feel connected with other teachers. By providing a formal structure where pre-service teachers can feel connected with teacher-leader, ASTA, and the science education community, the degree of which they feel disconnect will be lessened and retention of teachers will increase.

ASTA will couple face-to-face professional development via a statewide conference and regional professional development meetings with on-line communities to develop relationships among ten teacher leaders (mentors) with ten pre-service teachers (protégés). The TLP program will coordinate the content of the strands of the statewide conference with the regional professional development programs for mentors and protégés. The program will develop capacity of regional teacher leaders by extending teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of conference strands with on-going, on-line teacher and mentor-protégé affinity groups that are reinforced in regional face-to-face professional development programs.

ASTA TLP Program is made possible through the support of SRP.