Preparation of Science Teachers and the Challenges They Face

Much as been made of the approaching challenges and solutions to science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) literacy for the next generation. To meet these challenges, we have to explicitly recognize and tackle a range of challenges that can obstruct the recruitment, training, support, and success (i.e. student learning) of STEM teachers. First, the best students have to be made aware of the rewards (and challenges) associated with K12 science teaching - they have to be recruited into teaching as a career. Next, they have be well prepared (perhaps even more rigorously prepared than those going on to graduate training) so that they have an accurate and justifiably confident understand the discipline(s)they will be called upon to help their students learn. They need to understand how people learn, the most effective strategies to encourage learning (i.e. teaching), and how to apply those approaches in a wide range of (often challenging) classroom environments. Finally, the materials that these teachers are called upon to teach must be teachable, that is, they must be realistic in terms of both scope and depth. As an example, all too often State Science standards call for an understanding of “Organismic Biology”, “Human Biology”, or “Ecology” without clearly considering what that means in terms of the implicit and foundational concepts derived from chemistry, mathematics, molecular and evolutionary biology, and physics. While superficially comprehensive, many standards are often unteachable and unlearnable, except in a trivial and superficial manner - they can leave teachers frustrated and students unprepared (but worse, unaware of their own partial and mis-understanding). The answers to the challenge of effective STEM education are, at least naively: i) to encourage undergraduate science programs to explicity design coherent curricula that can promote the required level of subject mastery; ii) to insure that effective pedagogical techniques are implemented in science courses and taught through the schools of education, and iii) that science and pedagogy experts are called upon to consider, and limit, what teachers will be expected to help their student master. The presentations in this symposium will address some of these topics.