Instructional knowledge of STEM: The voices of STEM teachers in Taiwan

STEM education has been receiving increasing attention in Taiwan over the past decade. Since it is interdisciplinary in nature, STEM teachers must be equipped with a wide spectrum of knowledge and great number of strategies that enable them to be responsive to students’ learning needs. Considering that STEM teachers are often instructors of specific foundational subjects, a diverse professional learning community (PLC) is especially important; such communities offer teachers of different academic subjects the opportunity to gather together for curriculum development and teaching enhancement. In this study, we interviewed teachers from a selected high school PLC that had effectively developed a series of STEM curricula and that was known to be inspirational and motivational to its members. We profiled this PLC by describing one of its courses, documenting the teachers’ instructional knowledge of STEM, and cross-referencing their ideas with regard to their PLC. The results of this study reveal the current state of Taiwan’s STEM education and its teachers’ development of instructional knowledge in STEM.