PT3 > Team 1



		TEAM 1 A Resource Base for Learning to Teach Science Andy Anderson and Gail Richmond We propose the development of a course website and resource base to support secondary science teacher candidates' learning about teaching and technology. We see this as incorporating several components: A searchable resource base that would include (for each of about 30 topics in the secondary science curriculum): ideas about core content for the topic, tasks or instructional activities, links to state and national standards, and links to appropriate web resources. Development of this resource base would be a joint effort involving both our teacher candidates and us. It will be sustained over the two-year period (TE 401-2 and TE 802-4) that we work with this cohort of science teacher candidates. A system for electronic submission of assignments and sharing of ideas, organized so that contributions are organized both by science topic and by identities of contributors. Support for the development of teacher candidates' web sites and electronic portfolios, both of which would be required of the teacher candidates during their internship year. Although this will not be supported by PT3 funds, we will also be developing a book on learning to teach science with an accompanying CD-ROM and/or website. Background We have been team-teaching secondary science teacher candidates since the beginning of the current program in 1993. This fall we will be starting with our fifth cohort of seniors. We will start working with a group of about 50 secondary science majors in TE 401 this fall and continue teaching them through TE 804 in spring 2003. We believe that we have developed a good understanding of the challenges that our teacher candidates face. For example, for each topic that they teach, the teacher candidates must transform their subject matter knowledge into forms useful for teaching, develop appropriate goals for their students, find or develop instructional activities that will help their students learn with understanding, and assess their students in ways that give them insights into their students' thinking and into their own instructional strategies. We have also developed a sequence of field-based assignments that both give us insight into our teacher candidates' teaching practices and scaffold their engagement in good science teaching. We are convinced of the power of these tasks, described in our course website: http://www.msu.edu/course/te/802/science2001/index.htm However, we have been frustrated by our difficulties in promoting effective collaboration and resource sharing among our students. Our current mechanisms for sharing examples of work and resources are clumsy and not well organized. (See, for example, the student projects and unit plans on the course web site.) The resource base we develop through this project will provide topic-specific support for our students and enable us to develop a robust a community of practice over the two-year period. It would also allow us to work more effectively with mentor teachers and document our work for science teacher educators at other institutions looking for ideas to deal with some of these same issues. Support from Related Projects We recognize that this project is ambitious, but we think it may be doable because we can build on other work already underway. In particular, the system that Dan Chazan, Irfan Muzaffar, and Dave Hildebrandt have been working on in their PT3 project has two qualities that are important for our plan. First, they are developing a system that allows teachers (or teacher candidates in our case) to keep files both in their personal space and in a shared, topically organized database. Second, the hierarchical, topic specific organization of their database could easily be adapted to science. Since it is primarily a file-sharing system, the Chazan plan currently lacks a mechanism for presenting and organizing authoritative knowledge (as established either by peer review or instructors' authority) and evaluating teachers' work. We therefore will also need to use some kind of course-building framework, such as Blackboard or the one being developed by Gerd Kortemeyer , LON-CAPA (http://lecture.lite.msu.edu/~korte/lon/index.html). Work Plan We will spend the summer developing a prospectus for the book and a first version of the course web site. We would like to have a database covering all common topics in the secondary science curriculum with links to authoritative sources such as state and national goals in place by the end of the summer, as well as a course website with forms and procedures for submitting files to be shared. The development of the system for organizing and sharing student work could then take place over the 2001-2 academic year. We expect to be working cooperatively with Dan Chazan's group on this part of the project. We are thinking of having all candidates use either the Windows or the Mac version of Microsoft Office 2000/1. This would (a) allow us to make use of shared forms or templates, (b) help with software compatibility problems, and (c) simplify technical problem solving. This would probably require us to make laptops available to candidates whose own computers lack the capacity to handle Office. Dissemination and Impact We believe that this project fits well with other infrastructure-building efforts of the college. We can use it as a model for other Team 4 faculty and staff, both for development of instructional support systems-in the MSU classroom and in the field--and for development of multimedia portfolios for assessment and candidates' job searches. We also feel that we are well situated to gain national recognition for this work. The resource base will have a cumulative record of teacher candidates' work with our commentaries and their revisions. It can serve as a resource for research as well as teaching. Our work in this field is already finding a national audience. We had a very successful "Methods for Methods" three-hour workshop at the NARST conference last year and an equally successful follow-up interactive session this year. Each of these attracted about 60 participants (see http://www.msu.edu/~andya/NARST2000/). The participants reacted enthusiastically to both sessions, so we feel confident that our ideas will be well received by both practitioners and researchers nationally. In addition to conference presentations and research articles, we intend to develop a book on science teacher development. It would probably be published in the Teachers College Press Ways of Knowing in Science series (Andy is on the Editorial Board), and it would have an accompanying CD-ROM and/or web site based on the class resource base. The book and CD-ROM would combine elements of a methods text and a research monograph. It would present key readings about ideas, assignments, and activities like a methods text, but it would also include stories and examples of how teacher candidates responded to these assignments and activities and theories about their development as teachers. We are submitting a UCRIHS proposal, and we will develop a prospectus for the book this summer.