A NOVEL EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE TEACHER PREPARATION PROGRAM

All across the nation, universities have been called upon to make the preparation of high quality teachers a priority. Many universities have a long history in the preparation of future teachers-traditions that all too often make radical innovation nearly impossible. Our new program is designed to prepare undergraduate science majors to be secondary science teachers concurrent with their pursuit of a science degree. Our goals are to create high-quality science teachers who are steeped in science content, have extensive field-experiences that are tightly aligned with a suite of science pedagogy courses, are building and practicing pedagogical content knowledge, and are becoming reflective practioners. In a concerted effort to achieve these core understandings in our students, we have carefully structured a purposeful set of student experiences for our students. These include science pedagogy courses that operate in a participatory seminar format and numerous, highly-structured secondary school field experiences that include specific tasks to guide students to understanding the full width and breadth of exemplary science teacher actions. The program also relies heavily on a teachers-in-residence program where four high school biology/chemistry teachers and one high school physics/chemistry teacher are on sabbatical loan to work on campus with TPP faculty. Prior to the student teaching semester, TPP students complete guided-inquiry activities on the nature and process of science over a minimum of 120 hours in the secondary classrooms of our mentor-teachers. Unique to our program, ALL teaching and learning courses that constitute the program are taught by science education faculty and are filled with science students who have successfully completed a minimum number of college science courses. The program does not belong to any specific department in the College of Science but rather is conceived as a college-wide academic enterprise.