professional development initiative aimed atadvancing equity in STEM classrooms through collaborative reflection, training, andexperimentation. The program was structured over two intensive days and featured: ● Interactive workshops on inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy; ● Case-based learning to explore real classroom challenges related to diversity and engagement; ● Group discussions to foster peer learning and share strategies for equitable instruction; and ● Development of individualized action plans, designed by each participant to guide implementation of CR strategies in their own classrooms.Each faculty member participated in a 45–60-minute individual interview, where they reflected ontheir teaching philosophies
andmentoring role demand that they carry cause mental, emotional, personal, and professionaltaxations that are too numerous to count. At the same time, there are actions that universities cando, particularly in the domain of professional development to support this bright and talented groupof faculties in engineering:• Recommendation #1: Institutionalize invisible mentoring rewarding mechanisms. From the findings and from national reports [1], there is a lot of unrecognized and unacknowledged mentoring that Black faculty mentors in engineering face compared to White faculty counterparts when advising Black Ph.D. students and other underserved students. Simply keeping numerical tabs and individual development plans is not enough to support
yearsof teaching experience, and 28% having less than 10 years of teaching experience. While the vastmajority of the respondents taught engineering technical cores, 9% taught complementary studiescourses (i.e., humanities, social sciences, and business courses). Most of the respondents (>70%)were white and male.The interviews focused on the effective teaching practices that instructors had introduced from2020 to 2022, and their plans for future teaching. Of the 11 interviewees, three instructors taughtengineering courses but in different engineering fields while others were instructors who taughtcourses in other disciplines than engineering. We recruited most of these participants via aquestion in the instructor survey and a few from student
education experience which includes STEM academic and student success/support programming, strategic planning, data analytics, and program evaluation. As a PI, she has garnered funds in excess of $3 million dollars from both NIH and NSF for broadening participation in STEM Undergraduate Education and as an Evaluator has worked on large projects with NSF (Big Data, BioGraph), Google CS-ER, and DOD STEM Student Success. Her distinguished record of STEM programmatic success (at HBCUs and PWIs) is well documented in publications and presentations. Dr. Leggett-Robinson’s latest publications, ”Demystifying Promotion & Tenure: A resource for Black Women” and ”Overcoming Barriers for Women of Color in STEM” are resources