ENHANCING THE EARTH SCIENCE COMPETENCE AND CONFIDENCE OF PRE-SERVICE ELEMENTARY TEACHERS USING A PARTICIPATORY MULTI-LEVEL APPROACH

Central Wyoming College (CWC) is a small rural community college with a diversity of abilities in the general student population that is also reflected in our courses for pre-service elementary teachers. These students are required by the State of Wyoming to complete three four-credit lab science courses, one each in life, earth and physical science that are coupled with three one-credit science-teaching seminars. They are required to take two out of three of these subject matter areas for their AA in Elementary Education, but many choose to complete all three areas before transferring to the university for their bachelor’s degree. At the upper-division level, they are required to take a three-credit science teaching methods course. With all of this required exposure to science and teaching methods, one might assume that our students are both competent in content and confident in teaching science in their elementary classroom.

There are two end-members in the pre-service community: those with no fear or dislike of science and those with plenty of fear and/or dislike. The earth and physical science education seminars take the approach of having the pre-service teachers teach at least one lesson, in different science topics, at each educational level (elem., middle and high) to students enrolled in the science lab courses. The rationale for this approach is multi-fold: 1) pre-service teachers often have to begin their careers in a higher level than they’d like; 2) teachers need to know more about a subject than the ones they are teaching (teaching to a higher level forces them to think deeper) and 3) teaching lessons to their peers allows for instructive evaluation and reduces the “faking it” factor. While the topic is assigned, the activity is not. Therefore, the pre-service teachers gain experience in finding the resources they need to teach a lesson.

All activities must be pre-approved by the seminar instructor prior to use in the classroom and are shared with all of the other students in the seminar. Each lesson is evaluated by all students. In this way, a portfolio of science lessons is created that can be used or adapted in their future classrooms. Creating the portfolio and teaching to a diverse population, at various levels, enhances the competence and the confidence of the pre-service elementary teachers from our institution.