The teachers walking back into classrooms this fall carry more than lesson plans. For 133 K-12 educators who spent part of their summer in TGR Foundation’s STEM Studio program, they’re also bringing back new instructional strategies shaped by 156 hours of hands-on professional development, training that collectively reaches more than 17,000 students across the country. The program, now marking its 10th year, is a reminder that the workforce development conversation extends well beyond corporate L&D budgets: teacher training carries its own persistent, well-documented gap, and closing it has measurable downstream effects on what students actually learn.
STEM Studio, hosted in partnership with DoW STEM, is built specifically to strengthen how K-12 educators teach science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, the STEAM disciplines. This year’s program ran 13 sessions across Anaheim, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, supplemented by virtual sessions available to educators nationwide. Thirty percent of participants attended more than one session, a completion pattern that suggests the program is functioning less as a one-time credential and more as an ongoing professional resource educators return to.
The scale of the underlying problem is what makes that engagement notable. A National Science Foundation-funded study found that only approximately one-third of high school science teachers received 36 or more hours of science-focused professional development over a three-year period, a threshold researchers generally consider necessary for training to meaningfully shift classroom practice. Put differently: most science teachers in the country are operating with far less structured support than the research suggests they need, and that gap is even more pronounced in the under-resourced communities TGR Foundation specifically targets.
The research on what happens when that gap closes is fairly clear. Meta-analyses of STEM-focused teacher professional development have found that programs with stronger effects on teacher practice consistently produce larger downstream gains in student achievement, with pooled effect sizes across large-scale studies ranging from roughly 0.21 to 0.56 standard deviations depending on program design and how tightly the research measured classroom implementation. The throughline across that research is consistent: professional development that changes what a teacher actually does in the classroom, not just what they know, is what moves student outcomes. That’s the design principle STEM Studio appears to be built around directly.
Eric Moore, Vice President of Programs at TGR Foundation, framed the program’s goal in similar terms, describing the aim as helping educators build learning experiences that feel real and relevant to students rather than abstract curriculum requirements. “When we empower educators with the right tools, strategies and support, they can create learning experiences that feel real and relevant to their students,” Moore said. That focus on relevance and hands-on application echoes what the research literature identifies as one of the strongest predictors of effective teacher PD: active, sustained, collaborative learning rather than passive, one-off workshop attendance.
The program’s structure reflects that same logic. STEM Studio runs across four progressive levels, each building on the one before it, guiding teachers through inquiry-based and student-led learning approaches. In 2026, TGR Foundation introduced the fourth level, Building Inquiry Innovators, in which teachers first experience open-ended inquiry as students themselves before developing their own lessons and activities. The session also explores eight domains of an entrepreneurial mindset, including curiosity, creativity, problem-solving and adaptability, framing STEM instruction not just as content delivery but as a skill set students will carry into careers that don’t yet exist in their current form.
For teachers working inside real-world constraints, time, curriculum requirements, limited budgets, that structure appears to land. Alex Kezar, a teacher at Florence Griffith Joyner Elementary School in the Los Angeles Unified School District, described the program as providing an accessible way to teach STEM content despite those pressures. “I absolutely loved STEM Studio. I’m going to be bringing all the activities back to my classroom,” Kezar said, a response that reflects the kind of direct, immediately applicable training design the underlying research consistently associates with actual classroom change, rather than professional development that stays theoretical.
The economics of the program are also worth noting from a workforce-development lens. Each multi-day training is valued at more than $400 per participant but delivered at no cost to educators, with support from DoW STEM. Los Angeles cohort participants additionally had the opportunity to earn professional learning credits toward salary advancement, tying the training directly to career incentives rather than treating it as an unpaid extracurricular obligation, a structural detail that matters given how frequently teacher PD competes with educators’ limited discretionary time.
Since opening its flagship Learning Lab in Anaheim in 2006, TGR Foundation has now provided professional learning and support to nearly 7,500 educators across Southern California, Philadelphia and beyond. That decade-plus track record, combined with a curriculum structure that research increasingly validates, positions STEM Studio less as a one-off philanthropic gesture and more as sustained infrastructure investment in a workforce pipeline problem that extends well past any single classroom: the teachers training this summer’s cohort of students are, in a very direct sense, shaping the STEM talent pool employers will be hiring from in a decade.
Market Landscape
STEM Studio operates within a broader landscape of corporate- and foundation-backed teacher professional development initiatives, as companies across technology, engineering and manufacturing sectors increasingly invest directly in K-12 STEM pipelines to address long-term talent shortages. As enterprise employers, including major technology firms building AI and engineering talent pipelines, look further upstream in the education system to secure future workforce supply, programs combining research-backed instructional design with direct classroom application are increasingly viewed as a credible complement to corporate L&D and university partnership strategies.
Top Insights
- TGR Foundation’s STEM Studio trained 133 educators across 156 hours of summer programming, reaching classrooms that collectively serve more than 17,000 students nationwide.
- Only about one-third of high school science teachers receive 36 or more hours of science-focused professional development over three years, according to National Science Foundation-funded research, underscoring a persistent training gap.
- Research meta-analyses show STEM teacher professional development programs with stronger effects on classroom practice produce measurably larger gains in student achievement.
- The program’s new fourth level, Building Inquiry Innovators, incorporates entrepreneurial mindset training alongside inquiry-based teaching methods, expanding beyond traditional content delivery.
- Now in its 10th year, STEM Studio has trained nearly 7,500 educators since 2006, positioning it as sustained infrastructure for the long-term STEM talent pipeline.
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