Many of the colleges and universities involved in Project 30 have begun their own efforts to redesign teacher training; most grew out of collaboration between education schools and colleges of arts and sciences. Following are some of the program descriptions provided at the group’s meeting here last week:
Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., has developed a set of seminars designed to provide students with “pedagogical content knowledge.” The subject of the seminars, led by a liberal-arts faculty member and one from the college of education, is the teaching style used by the liberal-arts instructor.
A mathematics professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque is providing graphing calculators to local high-school teachers and instructing them in their use.
The University of Georgia in Athens has developed a program to train students to serve as science resource teachers in elementary schools.
“Science and the Young Child,” a course being piloted at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., attempts to intertwine professional studies with liberal arts by teaching how children acquire scientific knowledge. It is taught by a biologist and an elementary-science specialist.
The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee has developed 13 one-credit mini-courses in the basic-science content of elementary school.
The University of Delaware is piloting an honors mathematics course and an astronomy course that provide prospective teachers with an overview of those disciplines through readings of seminal texts or “great books.”
A sweeping redesign of the teacher-training program at Brooklyn College in New York provides students with a whole sequence of integrated studies. Students take interdisciplinary courses in comprehensive core areas--the social sciences, the arts and humanities, and the natural sciences. Instruction in educational theory and practice comes in a series of “studio courses” that relate directly to the interdisciplinary curricula.
Weber State College in Ogden, Utah, has created a teacher academy for outstanding precollegiate teachers. Focusing on a single discipline each year, the academies offer teachers and college professors an opportunity to exchange information.
