Training Science Teachers: Challenges and Opportunities

Science education research indicates that, in order to teach effectively, teachers need not only in-depth knowledge of the subject they are teaching and an understanding of how that subject is learned.  Without both, teachers can have difficulty teaching reform-oriented science courses.  The predominant model for teacher preparation programs in the US, however, is for science teacher candidates to take a number of pedagogy courses targeted at secondary teachers in general, accompanied by a few courses for science teachers. This model persists despite compelling evidence that student performance is linked to teachers’ content knowledge. A different paradigm for science teacher preparation and inservice professional development is to focus on discipline-specific content preparation in courses specifically designed to challenge teachers’ content knowledge, as well as to build their pedagogical content knowledge. In that regard, such experiences seek to bring teachers to understand how scientific knowledge is constructed, and explore the effective examples, analogies, and activities within their discipline of science. In addition, the courses help preservice teachers develop an appreciation of students’ common prior ideas and misconceptions. This presentation will briefly review the research supporting the development of teachers’ discipline-specific content knowledge, and will then present the cases of two ongoing projects targeted at developing the knowledge of biology teachers. The first case involves the course “Teaching and Learning Biology” at the University of Colorado at Boulder, co-created and co-instructed by faculty in the School of Education and the department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. This course was designed as a senior-level critical thinking class and compelled students to critically reflect upon their own understanding of fundamental biological concepts. The second case involves ongoing research with inservice biology teachers centered around the teachers’ – and their students’ - understanding of the theory of natural selection for the purpose of improving instruction. Connections between these two cases will be discussed as evidence supporting the content-specific preparation of biology teachers.