Attending to Teacher Considerations in I-STEM Curriculum Supplementation: The Case of Chip Kids

To address a projected workforce gap in microelectronics, numerous companies and universities are introducing programs that bring authentic, industry-focused practices into K-12 education. Integrated STEM has emerged as an innovative approach to address the urgent push to improve STEM education. Teachers, often trained in a single discipline, are tasked with supplementing their existing curriculum to achieve this interdisciplinary approach. To better understand, we examined the conceptions and considerations of K-12 teachers who were engaged in an industry-led I-STEM professional development and were given supplemental curriculum materials. Teachers were provided with a high-quality, integrated STEM supplemental curriculum, given time to engage with it, and asked how they would use it in their classrooms. This qualitative study sought to understand the factors teachers consider when implementing integrated STEM curriculum supplementation. We found that the primary factors teachers consider during the initial stages of integrated STEM curriculum supplementation are: (1) the curriculum’s potential to enhance students’ knowledge and students’ skill development, (2) the quality of curriculum attributes, and (3) the necessary adaptations for integration into their classroom instruction. Furthermore, teachers rarely mentioned applications across STEM disciplines, which means that meaningful I-STEM PD should be grounded in integrated frameworks that explicitly guide the desired integration and use the curriculum supplement to apply knowledge and practices from other disciplines. Our findings underscore the need to explore how meaningful I-STEM professional development can be designed and delivered using levels of I-STEM integration as a framework.