The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education (21PSTEM) is an independent, nonprofit research and action organization dedicated to identifying and implementing ways to transform education to empower learners and improve lives. By working with a network of nearly 40 collegiate, nonprofit and for-profit partners, 21PSTEM develops and manages both large and small scale projects where diverse and varied expertise can be utilized in a collaborative environment to maximize program effectiveness and efficacy.
What They Value:
- -Their dual purpose of conducting research and implementing best practices in STEM education to foster engagement and learning for all students.
- -Using research and products/services to make a positive impact on education policy and practice.
- -Developing and nurturing partnerships with educational institutions, businesses, and the research community.
- -Their diverse experience and perspectives.
- -The strategic use of their strengths.
- -An organization that promotes creative freedom, where employees are stakeholders invested in and responsible for the future of the organization.
- -Effective, timely and transparent communications.
- -A flat organization, with distributed decision-making processes
- -A work environment where all employees’ voices are heard, respected and valued.
- -Policies and procedures that are clear, equitably applied, and consistently followed.
Who They Are:
An aerospace engineer once wrote that of the two, teaching was harder than rocket science. If this is true, then reforming education is harder than landing on the moon. After all, they have done the latter, 46 years ago, but much of the education reform launched during this same period has rarely made it into orbit.
Still, as most any scientist, engineer, artist or performer will tell you, there is much to be learned from failure, and education reform is no exception. This makes the staff at 21PSTEM a very learned bunch as they have witnessed many initially highly touted reform practices and policies fail. Their deep and varied experience in schools and education reform efforts spans 20- 50 years and has allowed them to learn from these failures and apply new approaches to improve instruction and the systems that support it. 21PSTEM staff also has a broad range of relevant experience: from Ph.D.-level qualitative and quantitative researchers; to former superintendents, curriculum directors, principals and teachers; to computer programmers and project operations people.
If the diverse staff at 21PSTEM has studied educational failure from all angles, they have also witnessed and facilitated plenty of education’s successes through a variety of research and development projects. Not just the success that comes from a test score, but success that comes: when a child grows intellectually, emotionally and morally; when a teacher masters a challenging practice; or a whole system adopts and sustains a reform. You know it when you see it. There is immense satisfaction to be had in empowering learners and improving lives. It is these experiences of success, and wanting to see more of it, that motivates them here at 21PSTEM and fulfills their core purpose as an organization.
They take “quality education for all” personally. They work to make sure that everyone has it. They analyze an educational problem from all angles, studying what has been tried and conceiving what has not been done or what can be done better. They challenge conventional assumptions about curriculum organization, learning environments, instructional methods, grading practices, professional development, and teacher and administrative leadership and evaluation. They leave no assumption unexamined and they work together to gain a 360 degree view of the problem.
Thus, one dimension of 21PSTEM is as a research organization – a think tank funded by merit-reviewed federal and foundation grants producing cutting edge ideas applicable to research and practice. But they are also a “doing” organization. They develop and implement large-scale, innovative education projects. They have a superb group of doers. However, tehy do not do it alone. Their middle name is “Partnership.” They have worked on projects with nearly 40 different universities, non-profit, and for-profit partners, as well as dozens of individual consultants. These extraordinary sets of partners have allowed them to take on projects that no one partner could have done on their own as their history will attest.
To do this, 21PSTEM’s organization structure is design to be “flat” and agile so that it can respond quickly to opportunities by assembling the right mix of partners for the project at hand. 21PSTEM has all of the accounting and fiscal management policies in place to operate large scale projects with multiple sub-grantees. 21PSTEM’s business operations are designed specifically around handling government education related grants. Even so, they welcome the opportunities to work with individual schools and teachers to transform education for their students. They invite you to peruse their site and contact any one of them to discuss your ideas for transforming education to empower learners and improve lives.
Origins
The history of 21PSTEM shares many of the same surprising twists and turns, of non-linear events and circuitous routes, that marks the peculiar nature of any good story.
They begin in 2006, mid-way through a five-year $12.5 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to La Salle University, the largest in its history, to establish the Math, Science Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (MSPGP), an unprecedented partnership of 45 Philadelphia area school districts and 13 colleges and universities. The MSPGP had three ambitious goals: improve students’ achievement in math and science; increase the quantity and quality of STEM teachers; and research how to do the first two. In engineering terms, the MSPGP was a big design research experiment. Like anyone conducting an experiment, they had some idea of what they were doing, but the whole purpose of an experiment is to learn from it. They conceived plans, implemented them, learned from them, and then went back to the drawing board to start a new cycle.
The MSPGP leadership team consisted of five people: three from the college level – a mathematician, a geologist and a science educator – together with a cognitive psychologist and a school district superintendent. More than 100 college faculty were involved, and several thousands of teachers, and tens of thousands of students. They were learning a great deal about how to enhance student engagement and learning. As a design experiment, new ideas and promising avenues for innovation had emerged. But the grant and funding was scheduled to end in two years. What then? The MSPGP leadership team decided to form a non-profit research and action organization to continue and expand upon the MSPGP, if they could obtain new funding.
The Launch
In September, 2007, the MSPGP leadership team incorporated The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education. 21PSTEM was intended to be an agile, neutral broker or “connector” to bring institutions and human resources together to form robust partnerships to undertake projects no one institution could easily do on their own. Now as 21PSTEM, tehy assembled a partnership with the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Pittsburgh and Research for Better Schools to write a six-year, $10 million proposal to The U.S Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to establish The 21st Century Center for Research and Development in Cognition and Science Instruction, (Cog Sci Center).
In June 2008, to their surprise, they were awarded the grant and 21PSTEM was launched. This was their Big Bang moment. The Cog Sci Center was a large and audacious undertaking. The goal was to have a team of scientists apply cognitive science principles to modify three science units from two different science curriculum programs in 60 middle schools, provide professional development to teachers from 120 middle schools and then compare the results of these interventions to student outcomes in 60 business-as-usual middle schools. Using a randomized control trial design (RCT), 180 schools, 740 teachers and thousands of students were involved across five districts in Arizona and two in Pennsylvania. In total, 90,000 tests in 36 versions were administered.
