Ignited (formerly Industry Initiatives for Science and Math Education)

Each year, Ignited seeks to:

*Motivate and revitalize teachers, provide them with new content and curriculum development skills, and strengthen their commitment to their students' educational outcomes.
*Reach Bay Area students with more current and relevant industry content and updated teaching practices so they are better prepared for advanced STEM courses and careers.
*Ensure 100% of participating teachers develop actionable lesson plans, which are made available at no cost to any interested teachers
*Support underserved students and connect diverse professional role models with the classroom to promote diversity in the STEM workforce

Our Teacher Summer Experience Program is designed to revitalize teachers and give them new industry content by placing them in companies to work on a “real world” application of their subject for eight weeks. As teachers contribute to a team, they also experience the realities of modern-day work culture, and they bring their experience with both industry content and workplace culture back to their students. Part of their stipend is tied to the completion of an actionable lesson plan, which teachers are highly encouraged to implement in their classrooms.

We emphasize supporting underserved students by recruiting teachers from high needs schools, as defined by free-or-reduced lunch proportions or test scores in the lowest quartile. To best serve these students, we are also committed to entering strategic partnerships to combine resources and strategies. In 2019, Ignited joined with two other nonprofit organizations, the Krause Center for Innovation (KCI) and Science from Scientists (SfS), to form StepUP (STEM Teacher and Employee Partnerships for Underserved Populations). Through industry-aligned curriculum, year-round professional development, and teacher-STEM professional relationships, this year-round approach aims to close STEM resource, career opportunity, and role model gaps for underrepresented students in high needs schools.

Our 35 years of experience in running this program has given us a positive reputation among both schools and companies in the Bay Area. We have developed many strong relationships with companies that are dedicated to supporting our work.

We continually collect teacher feedback to improve our programs each year, and our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our programs. Through external and internal surveys, we have demonstrated that Ignited has a positive impact on teacher retention, teacher leadership, National Board Certification rates, and teacher performance in the classroom. Retention rates for Ignited teachers are much higher than their peers in the state and nation, saving their districts thousands of dollars in teacher turnover costs.
Teachers specifically report being “transformed” by their Ignited experiences, increasing their knowledge and confidence in STEM subjects as well as their commitment to teaching. They also report that their students are generally more engaged. The student-driven lessons they bring back to the classroom replicate workplace learning and are proven to close the achievement gap for underserved and underrepresented students.

Over the past 35 years, Ignited has provided 3,798 Summer Experiences for teachers from 768 schools (665 public and 103 private) and 135 districts, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through these teachers, Ignited-related ideas have reached over 3.3 million students, approximately 53% of whom are educationally disadvantaged and traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields.

The Summer Experience Program continues to earn very high satisfaction ratings from the teachers it serves, and both internal and external evaluations reflect a highly effective program. Our most recent external evaluators described the program as, "a highly efficacious program that is consistently well-implemented and strongly valued by teachers and principals."

We have also expanded our portfolio to include programs such as the Company Experience Weeks, the Diversity Leadership Development Program, and StepUP. We plan to continue building partnerships like StepUP to expand our reach and increase our impact on students who are underserved and underrepresented in STEM fields.