CONTENT KNOWLEDGE FOR TEACHING: WHAT DO PRESERVICE EARTH SCIENCE TEACHERS NEED TO "ALIGN' WITH NGSS?

Although the Framework for K-12 Science Education (AFK12SE) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are designed for precollege science education, it is incumbent upon science faculty in undergraduate-serving institutions to be conversant in these documents whether or not any of the students in a given class have any intention of becoming a teacher. It is important to understand the nature of the science education that incoming students bring to class. The documents are a curriculum, but serve as a template against which curricula and assessments can be compared. As a tool for preservice teachers, mapping instructional approaches against the standards should be part of their teaching repertoire. In order to get beyond student understanding, the question of alignment with NGSS and AFK12SE is raised.

It should come as no surprise that nearly as soon as they were released (in some cases, before!), many instructional materials claimed to be aligned with NGSS (and overlooking AFK12SE), but failed to grasp the true nature of the documents by a focus on content knowledge alone. But a dissection of the performance expectations in NGSS reveal elements of not just disciplinary core ideas, but also science & engineering practices and cross-cutting concepts. As a result, “alignment” is a complex, 3-dimensional exercise that, while time-intensive, has the potential reward of students recognizing the importance of content classes whether or not they are future teachers of science.

Shulman’s concept of pedagogical content knowledge or PCK (1986) forms a basis for teacher-specific content courses, it has limits for content courses that are not specific to preservice teachers. This presentation will discuss frameworks for defining three-dimensional learning in geoscience content courses where future geoscience teachers are part of the course, where teachers of science at the elementary level are the only students in the class, and teaching methods classes of mixed Earth science and other science content areas. As a function of instructional organization, where these courses fall on a continuum between subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge allows one to define the content knowledge for teaching (CKT) in each course audience that underscores their utility in the preparation of teachers of geoscience.