Recruiting and retaining strong STEM teachers is a challenge for educators, STEM professionals, and policymakers.
Steve Robinson has been all three.
Robinson, who is now retired, started his career in academia where he served as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts, running a research lab.
After nearly a decade, he made a big career change, becoming a middle and high school science teacher. Robinson spent four years working at a private school, then got his master’s degree in teaching so he could work at a public high school in Eugene, Ore.
In 2005, Robinson needed to move to the District of Columbia for family reasons. He joined the competitive Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator program, which gives STEM teachers the chance to serve as policy advisers at federal agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Education, or on Capitol Hill.
Robinson, who grew up in Illinois, ended up working in the office of the incoming freshman senator from that state: Barack Obama. After the yearlong Einstein fellowship ended, he stayed on, becoming Obama’s legislative aide for education.
Then, of course, his boss was elected president. Robinson eventually found himself on the White House Domestic Policy Council, where he focused on science, technology, engineering, and math education.
From there, Robinson headed back to the classroom, serving as a science teacher for two different charter networks.
That circuitous career path has given him a unique perspective on some of the toughest issues in STEM education, including how to find, train, and keep good teachers in those fields.
Education Week chatted with Robinson over Zoom about what he’s learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You got your start teaching at the college level? What was that experience like?
I was a professor at the University of Massachusetts. And I remember they said, “What classes will you teach?” And I said, “I’d like to teach a course in plant molecular biology.” And they said, “OK, here’s the key to the classroom.” There was no, “Here’s how you teach. Here’s what you should teach. We care what you teach.”
I’ve often said that teaching at the university level and teaching at the high school and middle school level, they should be different verbs. It’s a totally different thing.
After leaving academia, you taught at a private school, then went to get your master’s so you could teach at public schools. Did you learn what you expected to in ed. school?
When I started at the ed. school, I was 50 years old. I had this discussion with [a professor]. And he said “Well, why do you want to do this?” And I said, “Well, I’ve been teaching for five years, but I don’t know that I’m an effective teacher. So I’d like to come to learn how to be an effective teacher.” He laughed and said, “Well, that’s not what we do here.” And then I said, “What do you do?” He said, “We teach people how to survive in the public schools.”
Based on your own experience getting a master’s degree in education, would you say that other STEM professionals who want to transition to the K-12 classroom should also pursue a teaching degree?
[Overall], it wasn’t useful for me to go to a college of education to get certified. There were parts of it that were useful. But basically, those parts had to do with the fact that I had a good teacher mentor.
There are lots of other ways to mentor teachers, because, really, what a lot of people need, who have skills in science, is the craft of teaching. Not the theory behind it, because the academic courses are designed by people who are academics like I was when I was a university professor. They’re trying to publish papers, right? They’re not great teachers. The best teachers that I had at the college of education were those who had been teachers for a long time at the middle school or high school level and could pass on the craft of teaching.
How did you think about those experiences when you went on to work in the policy world for President Obama?
The policy world is also very insular, right? Very few [people in federal policy] have ever been teachers. Most went to very good schools and very good colleges and only had an academic understanding of what the challenges are for the profession.
I remember being in meetings with people at the White House. We would have meetings with the CEOs of large companies, large tech companies. And they would say, “You know, if I wanted to teach, I can teach at Stanford, but I can’t teach at my local high school.”
And, you know, I think there should be some barriers of entry to teaching school—middle school, high school, elementary school. A lot of that is about how to manage a classroom, which is very different from managing a company or a corporation. [You need to know] how to have checks for understanding, how to listen to your students, how to break down your lessons, how to scaffold things. Those are very different skills. Just knowing science isn’t enough to be a good science teacher.
What do you feel is missing from the profession that would help retain good STEM teachers?
What drives teachers is being in a community of like-minded individuals who are good at what they do and want to get better. Teachers like the community aspect of teaching.
So, one of the things that really struck me about being a teacher was how little interaction I had with adults. When I was a student-teacher, my mentor was in the room, he observed me all the time, we talked at the end of every day about what I did right, what I did wrong. And I learned a lot from that experience, just being in the classroom with another adult.
Once I was controlling my own classroom, there was never an adult in my classroom. I was evaluated twice a year. And if I couldn’t have two good days of teaching in a year, [the district would have been right to fire me].
There’s too little accountability [for the quality of teaching] and too little in-class development of teaching skills.
When I went to Democracy Prep [a charter school], that system was totally different. My classroom was totally open. There were adults in all the time. I was observed, at least weekly, often several times a week by either my department chair, or another teacher, or the principal or assistant principal. And every week, I would meet with my department chair. And for the first couple of months, she would basically rip me to pieces about things that I hadn’t done correctly.
Wow. And this was after you worked at the White House on education policy, right?
Oh, yeah. I had worked in the White House. But that has nothing to do with being a good teacher.
