Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and Learning

Effective precollege STEM teaching provides students with meaningfully integrated horizontal (within-grade level) and vertical (across-grade levels) innovative experiences across scientific disciplines. This approach requires a holistic transformation of STEM learning across the curriculum and school experiences. This study adopted a social network perspective on learning to understand how innovation is ‘taken up’ by teachers across school buildings or districts, and characterized the nature of extant science teacher learning networks within a whole school district. Results show that science teachers’ learning networks were mostly siloed within buildings with hardly any cross-grade, cross-level, and cross-building relations. Additionally, teacher networks related to science teaching and learning were less elaborate when compared to other networks, such as those related to learning about classroom management.