Considerations in the Development of STEL-Aligned Professional Development Guidelines

Abstract

The release of the Standards for Technological and Engineering Literacy (STEL) in 2020 provided an updated perspective for the organization and teaching of technology, engineering, and design (TED) education content and practices. While STEL is designed to help guide TED curriculum, assessments, teaching practices, and teacher preparation efforts, concurrently there have been calls for high-quality professional development (PD) to assist school systems and educators in providing authentic TED learning experiences. This coupled with the growing number of out-of-content area and alternatively licensed educators being tasked with teaching TED courses suggests that there is a need for PD efforts to adequately prepare educators and school systems for providing rigorous and relevant, design-based STEL-aligned instruction. This chapter provides a synthesis of TED education PD studies from the literature and focuses on characteristics of effective PD, alignment of PD with TED and cross-cutting academic standards, PD standards for TED education, format and delivery considerations for effective PD, examples of previous TED education PD experiences that addressed various categories of educators’ knowledge (Shulman in Harvard Educ Rev 57:1–22, 1987), and addressing important TED specific issues through PD (i.e., specialized safety training required to oversee design-based TED laboratory experiences that provide unique learning opportunities). From this synthesis of the literature, recommendations for further research and future STEL-aligned PD efforts are provided.