Unlikely Pioneers

By Jeffrey Weld

My high school physics teacher used to tell us that if ignorance is bliss, we must be the happiest people on the planet. He was out to enlighten us on the mysteries of momentum, refraction, and the quantum, but his dry and windy lectures chased the bliss right out of us, if not the ignorance.

Twenty years later, I am in the privileged position of preparing science teachers. When I meet them as college juniors and seniors, or as postbaccalaureates enrolled in their first science-methods course, many are blissfully ignorant of the wide chasm that exists between effective teaching practices and the teaching they are all too familiar with as clients of K-12 and collegiate science. Most of them would surely teach as they were taught, if not for coursework on learning theory, exceptional children, developmental psychology, and active inquiry.

They would memorize the textbook chapter on thermodynamics the day before presenting a lecture on that topic. End-of-chapter questions in their teacher's manual would be assigned to measure students' note-taking skills. On Thursday, they might have a lab section where students use a prescribed recipe to complete a data table, then, after some number-crunching arrive at a figure that, with any luck, matches the one in the teacher's manual. On Friday, a quiz;...