Welcome to the first PROSPECT S-STEM newsletter for Fall 2023--I hope your semesters are all going well! We have been listening to what you want, and this fall are structuring whole group meetings to provide lots of time for discussion in topical small groups. Focusing on advising, mentoring, partnerships, and STEM identities, you can choose to join the same small group each month, attend different group meetings each month, or suggest new focus topics to add a small group. Other than the overall topic, the discussion focus for each small group will be for attendees to share what they are doing in this area, what they hope to learn from each other, and for the group to generally discuss the key issues and how S-STEM projects are addressing those.
As a project, we want PROSPECT S-STEM to be a valuable resource for your local S-STEM. To that end, there are two short surveys in this newsletter that solicit your input. One newsletter story "Measures and Instruments Professional Learning Community" outlines the planned launch of a measures sub-group that will focus on creating a resource for S-STEM projects of helpful measures to use to assess key outcomes such as students’ STEM identities, students’ feelings of belonging, and students’ problem-solving efficacy. The group will curate a collection of existing instruments, and also identify gaps and work to create suitable instruments to measure variables of interest to S-STEM projects. We welcome your participation in this group, whether you are interested in helping curate existing measures and/or help administer measures to collect pilot data.
The other newsletter story that provides an opportunity for input is that we want to help collect up the “wisdom of S-STEM projects” and create useful resources for you and others seeking to create productive and co-equitable partnerships across associates- and bachelors-granting institutions to support transfer students. In this story, we are asking you about what practices your professional learning community (PLC) has used (or practices that you know about even if your PLC hasn’t used them yet) for getting a PLC successfully started. This could be about how you decided who to invite to your PLC, how you convinced those people to join, how you are structuring leadership of your PLC (who leads it, how much is leadership shared), how your PLC agrees on and sets goals, how your PLC set norms, how your PLC is structured (where and how to meet, how often, for how long), and how your PLC has set up communication structures (shared folders, email listserv, etc). We invite you to share practices in any of these or other areas in this newsletter, and then the next newsletter will have a story to summarize the results.
Finally, I want to issue a call to all of you to share stories: we want to feature you in a future PROSPECT S-STEM newsletter. What fun things has your S-STEM project done? Do you have pictures from the September 2023 S-STEM Scholar Symposium and some scholars who would share their story of attending? Has your S-STEM project made progress with advising across institutions, sharing data, or offering courses in common? Please contact Theresa (jorgensen@uta.edu) to share your stories and be featured in a future newsletter. Your story doesn’t have to be written out, but could be bullet points or a video, or you telling us the story and having us write it.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing you at a future PROSPECT S-STEM meeting!
Wendy Smith