A New Look At Gender Equity Professional Development For Secondary Science/Mathematics Teachers And Counselors

WISE Investments (WI) is a four-year National Science Foundation project HRD 98 72818 designed for secondary science/mathematics teachers and counselors to enable them to help interest young women in engineering. A component of the WI program is gender equity training. Although the gender equity professional development module improved each year, the program coordinators thought that they could do better. In particular, teachers requested more applications and classroom strategies than statistics. In the fourth WI, a new approach to the gender equity presentation was taken by enlisting three Ph.D. science education majors and one Ph.D. education policy and leadership major. These four students all had recent and extensive experience in teaching K-12 science, thus had a natural understanding and empathy of the needs and everyday challenges of the teachers and counselors in the WI program. The training was organized around practical applications of gender equity in curriculum, instruction, and classroom climate. The PhD student team used expert teaching methods to gain credibility with the participants and to model best practices in instruction. Rather than reciting research, a gender equity assessment tool was designed to present the current findings in the literature and to evaluate the WI participants’ awareness of gender equity. The PhD team then facilitated gender equity discussions with the teachers and counselors by soliciting examples from the group. Next, the participants worked in small teams to identify gender bias in textbooks and to examine biases in teacher-to-student interactions through a case study analysis. The group also viewed and discussed the teacher-to-student interactions shown in a video. The PhD team also devised specific strategies to improve curriculum, instruction, and classroom climate for girls. The teacher and counselor WI participants further brainstormed and personalized these strategies for immediate implementation in their classrooms. This paper will present the agenda for the successful three-hour workshop in two segments, the gender equity assessment tool, the guidelines for examining gender bias in textbooks, the interaction case study, and the classroom strategies to avoid bias and to promote gender equity in the classroom. Additionally, feedback from the WI participants on this training will be discussed.