At the new HHMI-funded program at Pennsylvania State University, molecular cell biologist Richard Cyr and his colleagues bring working teachers and education professors into freshman seminars to talk about teaching as a career and help interested students plan their coursework. They encourage academically successful biology majors to mentor their peers, watching them for traits like leadership, perseverance, and patience that predict a successful teaching career, Cyr says. Promising students are invited to help a graduate teaching assistant instruct a laboratory section of an undergraduate biology class; if they perform well, they are offered jobs as teaching assistants.

Many of the strongest programs, including UTeach, get undergraduates teaching early, which tends to get them hooked. Kristyn Moloney, a master’s student at Penn State, says that after running an introductory biology laboratory section as a junior, she knew science teaching was for her. Year-end course evaluations from her students showed her how she had helped them. “That’s what set it in stone for me, that this is what makes me happy,” she says.

Back to Basics

When students go out to teach, they need up-to-date knowledge of their discipline. So even though the prospective science and math teachers enter the Stony Brook program with at least a bachelor’s degree, half of their courses are still in their STEM discipline, be it mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, or geology, Bynum says. And the science-trained Noyce scholars and UTeach students have the grounding they need to teach STEM classes.

But most science and math teachers still come through education schools, and their knowledge of the discipline they are teaching may be outdated or sketchy, especially in the lower and middle grades. For example, a Department of Education survey in 1999–2000 found that 29 percent of middle-school biology teachers and 41 percent of physical science teachers were not certified to teach their subject and did not major or even minor in it as an undergraduate. Certification requirements have tightened since then in many states, but the problem remains.

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Maxine Singer, board president and founder of the Washington, D.C., branch of Math For America, a nonprofit dedicated to improving K–12 math education, recalls leading a training session for in-service elementary teachers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where she is president emerita. According to Singer, many struggled when converting all but the most basic fractions and decimals. Jeff Nordine, assistant professor of science education at Trinity University, had a similarly disheartening experience meeting with some in-service elementary school teachers. “It was news to them that water expands when it freezes,” he says. “I don’t remember not knowing that.”

Many future elementary school teachers are education majors who have taken a minimum of science during their undergraduate years, Nordine says. “They are uncomfortable with science, they don’t like it, and they feel dumb. Then they have to teach it to students.” Not surprisingly, the students lose interest in the subject.

Learning by Doing

When Nordine teaches elementary science education to future teachers, he tells them, “Listen, it’s OK to not know the answer; that’s what science is all about.” He helps them learn scientific content, as well as where to find journals and other science-teaching resources, from the National Science Teachers Association and elsewhere that can help them on the job.

Even more important, Nordine and other leading science educators also show future teachers how to create inquiry-based science units, in which students learn by solving real-world problems. For example, some preservice teachers in his elementary science education class have created a unit in which kids learn about density and buoyancy by investigating whether heavy objects sink and light objects float.

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