This four-credit course serves as an introduction to K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teaching, with a specific focus on science teaching. It is based on extensive research into how teachers learn to teach STEM and how students learn STEM. Three major principles have been incorporated into the course design: Principle 1: Learners come into classrooms with valuable pre-existing ideas, experiences, and language about STEM content and phenomena happening in the world around them. These have a profound impact on how they experience and interpret instructional activities in the classroom. Principle 2: Learners make sense of ideas and events through discourse with others (students, families, teachers, scientists, etc.) and teachers must develop systematic ways of engaging students in sense-making discourses for STEM learning. Principle 3: Teacher learning involves development of ideas about themselves, subject matter, students, and the processes of teaching and learning. These ideas exert influence on a beginner’s repertoire of teaching practice. Field experiences in schools, and broader historical, cultural, and political contexts further influence teaching. Repertoires of practice and underlying ideas about teaching are continually “under construction” and worthy of thoughtful reflection and inquiry. All Methods course activities are built around these principles and embodied in the “Science Learning Framework” shown above. This framework emphasizes the teaching of “Big Ideas” through 3 specialized discourses. These discourses allow all students the opportunity to participate meaningfully in science and STEM more broadly.
Grade Basis: Letter Grade
Credits: 4.0
