For any university committed to serving the educational needs of its
local community or region, the AMTA is prepared to guide development
of a Local Teacher Alliance (LTA) of STEM teachers and link it to the
national AMTA network for teacher enhancement and STEM education
reform. All that is needed to start is sponsorship from the physics
department. There are too many details about establishing a thriving
LTA to discuss here; suffice it to say that the AMTA is already
linked to high-functioning LTAs scattered across the nation. The good
news is that these LTAs have been created and run by the teachers
alone. The bad news is that in most cases, local universities have
not learned of the great advantages in linking up with them. For
starters, the LTA can provide a direct pipeline of students from high
school to the STEM disciplines in college, and such links are
prerequisites for successful STEM education reform.
The proposal that physicists must take the lead in organizing
scientists and engineers to support STEM education reform may seem
gratuitous, but the fact is that other disciplines are not nearly so
well prepared to do it. Consider chemistry, for example. Though the
AAPT has been supporting physics teachers for the better part of a
century, the American Chemical Society (ACS) created the comparable
American Association of Chemistry Teachers (AACT) only recently.
Making up for lost ground, the ACS is also partnering with APS to
create a ChemTEC to link up with PhysTEC, and the AACT is discussing
collaboration with the AMTA. Already, some 400 chemistry teachers are
taking Chemistry Modeling Workshops each year. Likewise, links of the
physics department to other STEM disciplines provide a natural
pathway to involve them in supporting LTAs for STEM teachers.
[Am. J. Phys. 83 (2), February 2015 http://aapt.org/ajp
copyright 2015 American Association of Physics Teachers]