Such lessons build on two decades of work by cognitive scientists and education researchers on how students learn. In a landmark 1998 study, for example, Barbara White of the University of California, Berkeley, and John Frederiksen, now at the University of Washington, had students at an urban middle school learn physics by doing it—by formulating a question, generating predictions, carrying out and analyzing experiments, and checking the results with scientific models. Compared with grade 11 and 12 physics students who memorized facts and plugged through algebraic formulas, the middle school students learned more physics (averaging 68 percent on a short test of physics comprehension, versus 50 percent for the high school students) and were better at thinking scientifically. Researchers have since honed their understanding of inquiry-based learning by determining which types of classroom exercises promote real inquiry and which don’t, says K. Ann Renninger, an HHMI-funded educator and education researcher at Swarthmore College.

Teachers can help students learn science by doing it, if the teachers have done the same. “Folks who want to teach need to know what it means to ask a good scientific question, to design experiments to answer it, and to interpret the results,” says Susan Stapleton, a biochemist who helps run the HHMI-funded preservice program at Western Michigan University. WMU is the sixth largest U.S. preservice teacher training school. Most of its students go the traditional route: they major in education, including a slew of pedagogy courses, and minor in their teaching specialty (WMU produced 463 preservice teachers in 2010; 91 were science and math teachers).

That’s why she and one of the program’s codirectors, science education professor Renee Schwartz, require science teachers-in-training like Lauren Miller to do a 10-week summer research project. But that’s just part of the program. “It’s one thing to give them research experience. It’s another to translate that into teachable units they can take into the classroom,” Stapleton says. So she and Schwartz will teach a class for preservice science teachers next spring on how to turn their research experiences into inquiry-based laboratory exercises. The trainees will then teach the exercises they’ve created to middle school students during a two-week science camp the following summer.

		Five teachers-in-training tell how their programs helped prepare them for the classroom. Read More

Giving preservice teachers tools like this helps them once they’re on the job. Laura Gurick, a 2010 CESAME graduate of Stony Brook University, drew on her training last year for the 10th-grade chemistry class she taught at Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, New York. She could have taught paper chromatography, a method to separate and analyze component chemicals from a mixture, using a conventional laboratory in which the students were told exactly what to do. Instead she drew on a workshop she’d taken at Stony Brook on how to turn a conventional laboratory into one that’s inquiry based.

Gurick told her students that there had been a kidnapping, that one of them was the kidnapper, and that a ransom note and a pen had been found at the scene of the crime. Several students were suspects, she added, and each suspect used a characteristic brand of pen. The students figured out how to use paper chromatography to distinguish the inks in Bic, RoseArt, and other pens. Most were able to finger the guilty suspect. “I wanted them to understand the concepts more deeply than they would if they had just been given the instructions,” Gurick says.

Getting in Practice

Stony Brook’s curriculum, like all good teaching programs, also requires preservice teachers to spend plenty of time in schools, watching and teaching. Before they’re allowed to student-teach in the third and final semester of their master’s course, preservice teachers at Stony Brook must spend 100 hours each observing teachers—in middle schools and high schools, in ordinary and high-need districts, and teaching different subjects. Many preservice teachers also help teach in the university’s unique biotechnology, chemistry, physics, and earth science teaching laboratories. Science teachers from 80 percent of Long Island’s school districts bring their students for half-day laboratories.

Establishing strong ties with local schools can pay off for much smaller teacher-training programs. At Trinity University, aspiring science teachers do a year-long internship at one of three “professional development schools”—elementary, middle, or high school—in San Antonio, where they are mentored by an experienced teacher. In exchange, the university appoints these mentors as clinical faculty for a year, complete with library and other privileges, and Trinity faculty lead professional development initiatives for the teachers at each school.

Back in Kalamazoo, Lauren Miller will do her student teaching next spring, and next summer she’ll teach eighth graders the unit she develops on sex hormones and obesity. Beyond that, she plans to teach family consumer science, which includes personal nutrition, reproductive health, and parenting, to high schoolers. She’ll take her newfound enthusiasm for science with her. “Science is asking questions—you ask one question and you’ve got 10 more after that,” Miller says. “I want to take that to my students and get them excited about science.”

		Part 1 of 2: This article focuses on preservice training—training college students and graduates to be STEM teachers. Part 2 of the series, on training teachers once they’re in the classroom—in-service training—is coming in February 2012.

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