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Re: What to "cover"



The teacher training programs described by Jane Jackson (both the program
offered at Arizona State and the use of veteran HS teachers to train
existing K-8 teachers) are sound ideas and certainly worth pursuing.
However, we also need the goal of sending science-prepared K-8 teachers into
the schools straight from college rather than hoping they will "upgrade
themselves" on the job.

In this respect I have to applaud what Ohio has recently done. New teachers
must decide between a K-3, 4-9, or 9-12 license while they are in college.
These are called early-childhood, middle-childhood, and young-adult
licenses.

To teach science at the 9-12 level you must essentially have a genuine major
in the field you're going to teach. This is not always literally true
because the requirements for a major vary from college to college, but you
need roughly 32 semester hours of "real" science courses in the specific
area you intend to teach (this does not include co-requirements such as
math). So a person satisfying the licensure standards would either have or
be very close to a physics (or chemistry or biology) major at most colleges.

The most significant improvement is for middle-school (grades 4-9). The 4-9
license requires a concentration in two fields. The most common choices for
science types are math/science. If we ever get to the point that we have
sufficient teachers, this means grades 4 through 9 will be
"departmentalized" and science courses must be taught by people with science
licensure, math taught by those with math licensure, etc. with each teacher
licensed in two areas.

At Bluffton College the 4-9 science license requires 10 semester hours of
physics, 5 SH of chemistry, 8 SH of biology, 4 SH of astronomy, 4 SH of
earth science, for a total of 31 SH of science. This automatically covers
the 7 SH general-education science requirement, so the 4-9 teachers take 24
SH of science beyond what they would have to take for gen-ed anyway.

For comparison, the math requirement for 4-9 teachers is 22 total SH
consisting of algebra, geometry, elementary statistics, calculus, and two
courses specifically for teaching math. The other teaching concentrations
for 4-9 are "language arts" and "social studies."

There has been some criticism of this program because some do not like the
idea of departmentalization and teacher specialization clear down to grade
4. But if we want to assure that math and science in grades 4-9 are being
taught by qualified people, this seems the proper way to go. Since the
teachers choose/complete two out of four areas for specialization, the
specialization is both reasonably broad yet reasonably focused.


Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817