Responding to the call for change: the new college of science teacher preparation program at the university of Arizona.

Abstract

The reports of several national commissions, like the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF, 1996 ) and the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century (NCMST, 2000 ), have urged higher education institutions to reevaluate traditional practices in teacher education and transform or develop new teacher preparation programs to remedy the major problems identified in these reports. Among these issues are the following: Lack of coherence within the teacher preparation programs, fostered by the paucity of communication among subject-matter faculty, education faculty, and experienced teachers in the secondary-school setting; Absence of connection and congruence between educational theory that is advocated (e.g., teaching for understanding) and the teaching that is practiced in the subject matter and pedagogy courses and in the majority of secondary science classrooms; Deficient subject matter preparation of teachers; and Inadequate and unfocused nature of school-based experiences for prospective teachers. Recent calls for reform of the traditional practices in teacher education have also stressed the need for subject-area colleges to become more accountable for the quality and the quantity of our nation's teaching workforce (Riley, 1998 ; National Research Council [NRC], 1999 , 2000 ). In this regard, the University of Arizona has a tradition of subject-area colleges taking primary roles in secondary-level teacher preparation. The College of Fine Arts and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have well-established programs for undergraduate teacher preparation, run by faculty members with appointments in their respective colleges rather than the College of Education (CoE). In the fall of 1999, the University of Arizona took a decisive step to continue its redistribution of responsibility for secondary-level teacher preparation by developing a science teacher preparation program housed entirely in the College of Science (CoS). The new CoS Teacher Preparation Program (TPP) was specifically developed and implemented to recruit and prepare undergraduate science majors to become secondary-level science teachers. The remaining sections of this essay describe 1) the development and evolution of the new CoS-based program, 2) describe the design of the program in response to the reform issues highlighted in the Introduction, and 3) comment on resources and academic issues related to the new program.