Many schools have been stepping up efforts to ensure students have the skills they need to be prepared for the jobs of the future, especially those in the STEM industry.
The problem is that nearly every state has reported shortages of math, science, and computer science educators.
One solution that some schools have found to be successful is recruiting STEM professionals who have a passion for teaching young people and/or want to give back to their industries.
For instance, Chris Page, the principal of Highlands Ranch High School in Colorado , said he has at least four staff members who left the STEM industry to become teachers. When his school was recruiting, he said what they focused on was marketing the job as a way to give back, especially because they can’t compete with the salaries STEM professionals earn in the industry.
“Typically, what we do is we try to put our information [on LinkedIn] about ‘are you looking for a way to give back to your industry and guide and coach the people who are coming up in your industry?’” Page said. “We get more responses from things like that.”
What’s great about the teachers who came from the industry, Page says, is that they can bring in the real-world knowledge that many students crave.
“It makes them way more credible with kids. Kids are like, ‘Oh my gosh, you did this? You lived this? I want to know more about it,’” Page said. “They’re also usually able to identify kids who are going to be more predisposed to that [STEM] lifestyle. They’re able to say, ‘Hey, this is what you can expect.’ I think that’s been really beneficial, too.”
In conversations with Education Week, three teachers from different schools shared why they switched from careers in industry to teaching, how their previous experience influenced their teaching, and what support they needed when they started in the classroom.
From geology to teaching science
After three years as a geologist in a gold mine in Colorado, David Thesenga was ready to change gears. He realized that what he enjoyed most about his job were the impromptu tours he would give to tourists and explaining what his company was doing with the gold mine, why they were doing it, and what the advantages were.
He went back to college, thinking he wanted to do something with environmental remediation (cleaning up pollution from soil or water), but he wasn’t enjoying that, either. So he tried out teaching.
From the moment he walked into the classroom for his first student-teaching course, “I ended up absolutely loving it,” Thesenga said. “I’ve never really looked backward, never regretted it.”
He’s now been teaching for 24 years. After receiving his master’s degree in secondary education, he taught in public schools in or near Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and today he teaches middle school science at a private school in Colorado.
He remembers being overwhelmed on his first day as a full-time teacher in Pasadena, Calif.
“I was like, ‘Is this really happening? Is this school going to give me 200 students?’ Yeah, here they start to come. And you’re like, ‘OK, I’m ready. I think I’m ready.’ But there are so many things that you just don’t know,” Thesenga said. “How do I put together a classroom? What the heck is an IEP? What’s a 504? [There’s] so much terminology, and you want to do so well for your students, and it just becomes overwhelming.”
But he had other new teachers with whom he could talk about the challenges of being a first-year teacher and a supportive principal who encouraged him to keep trying new lessons and new ways to share the knowledge he had with the students.
“If I didn’t have my support crew, I don’t necessarily know if I would have survived,” Thesenga said. “I could have certainly left the classroom and gone back to something I don’t enjoy and been like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to phone it in for another 30 years and call it good.’ But I had my passion, and I had my support crew, and I believed that I could do it.”
His industry experience gives him a lot of credibility with his students, Thesenga said, because he can walk them through the different careers they could go into, different challenges that come up, and put them in contact with people in the industry.
Thesenga said one of the biggest challenges in attracting STEM professionals into teaching is the pay. As a geologist, even with just a bachelor’s degree and zero experience, he had a six-figure salary. Now, with two more degrees and 24 years of experience as a teacher, he’s almost to a six-figure salary.
“I’m happy to take the pay cut because I love what I do,” he said. “This job gives me joy like no other job ever has.”
From chemical engineering to teaching math
For Christine Cammuso, changing careers from engineering to teaching was spurred by her need for a schedule that gave her more time with her kids.
For eight years, Cammuso worked as a process engineer in the chemicals and plastics industry. And though she enjoyed what she was doing as an engineer, she said what she enjoyed most was dealing with clients and helping people understand different concepts.
After that job, she stayed home for a few years to raise her two children, but when they were old enough to go to school, she started volunteering at their elementary school as a kindergarten assistant.
When she started, she said she felt “very happy” and it felt “so comfortable.” She was eager to help the teachers with anything they needed and, at some point, she said she even used the skills she learned from her previous job to streamline a process in the school library.
“Something just clicked,” Cammuso said. “I loved being in the school environment. I loved being around kids. I thought, ‘Wow, can I actually turn this into a full-time job?”
Eventually, the principal told Cammuso that there was a shortage of math teachers and encouraged her to look into an alternative-certification program, and she did. At the time, she had to do around 270 hours of professional development, along with passing the certification exams.
She taught 8th grade math for a year, then taught Algebra 2, precalculus, and Advanced Placement Statistics to 11th and 12th graders for 14 years in the Owasso public schools in Oklahoma. Now she teaches AP Physics, Environmental Sustainability, and Principles of Engineering to 11th and 12th graders at Tulsa Tech, a career and technical education system in the state.
Because she already had some experience at the elementary level, the transition to teaching high school full time wasn’t too difficult, Cammuso said. A lot of the challenge came from just “learning the ropes” and all the different procedures and administrative things that had to be done, she said.
Luckily, she had fellow teachers and a department chair who were very willing to help her and answer any questions she had, Cammuso said. But she also felt like her training as an engineer, her organizational skills, her problem-solving skills, all helped her succeed in her role as a teacher.
Being a teacher was “very exciting and very fun,” Cammuso said. “Every time a student would say, ‘This has never made sense to me before, but now it makes sense,’ and ‘Thank you, because I think I don’t hate math anymore. I think I might like it,’ that was very exciting. The first couple of years just made me want to keep doing it.”
Guiding students who were interested in math and science was one of the major reasons Cammuso stayed in the profession. Engineering is a high-earning career, but “being happy and feeling fulfilled goes beyond money,” she said.
Getting other STEM professionals into teaching would be “a matter of convincing people or reminding people that helping guide students into a field like engineering is a worthwhile endeavor,” Cammuso said.
From IT to teaching coding
Sarah Malanson worked in the information technology department for a global manufacturing company for 12 years. In her role, she often hired college interns to assist her, and that’s where she said she got her start working with younger people.
Then, Malanson worked in the IT department of Western New England University, where she also had a large staff of student employees. There, she started teaching a few courses related to IT and computer science, in addition to fulfilling her IT responsibilities.
Eventually, one of Malanson’s student employees there became the IT director for Pathfinder Regional Vocational Technical High School in Palmer, Mass., and recruited her for a teaching job.
“When he first mentioned teaching high school, I was kind of like, ‘That’s a hard no. I don’t think I’m interested in that,’” Malanson said. But the more she talked with him, the more she warmed up to the idea, she said.
The vocational and project-based-learning aspect of the job reminded her of what she’d already been doing with her college interns, and she was also interested in sharing her knowledge and “passing the baton down” to the kids who will be part of her industry in the future, she said.
She’s now in her seventh year of teaching programming and web development to high school students. But when Malanson started teaching in high school, she said it was “a steep learning curve.”
“I had taught in college, but college and high school are very different, so I had to adjust my expectations a little bit,” she said.
One of the biggest challenges she faced when she started was classroom management.
“I think everybody comes in, like, ‘Oh, I have all this knowledge that I’m going to drop on these kids, and they’re just going to hang on my every word and soak everything up,’ and then you go in there, and this [student] doesn’t care because their girlfriend broke up with them or things like that,” Malanson said.
A lot of teachers who come from the industry face this challenge, too, based on Malanson’s experience as a teacher mentor. What they need is “a really strong support system,” she said.
“These people are experts in their field,” Malanson said. “That’s not what needs to be supported. It’s about how to deal with a kid that comes in mad and doesn’t want to learn or had a bad night or had a fight with their friend on the bus—all these things you don’t see in the industry that you’re now face to face with.”
Malanson said she’s grateful she had a teacher mentor during her first year, as well as supportive administrators and colleagues who answered all her questions about managing the classroom and other challenges that came up.
“There’s a woman down the hall from me who would stop in and check on me pretty much every day,” she said. “I could literally poke my head in the door and ask questions. The vocational director would stop in and ask me if I needed anything. All the teachers were really fantastic.”
Malanson, who started teaching high school at 49 years old, said she hopes this is her last career.
“It’s a great way to wrap up a career,” Malanson said. “It’s very rewarding.”
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