Biological Sciences with Secondary Education Concentration

Inquiry Approaches to Teaching

Prerequisites: None, Credit Hours: 1, Field Experience: 2 School visits

SCI 2010, often referred to as Step 1, is the introductory course into the GeauxTeach program. In this course, students explore the field of education with a focus on STEM content and inquiry instruction. Students have the opportunity to collaborate with peers who share similar interests and form long-lasting collaborative relationships that are foundational to the GeauxTeach program. Directly following this course students can enroll in SCI 2011 to get field experience in a secondary classroom and try teaching adolescents for the first time. 

• Students evaluate their prior experiences within the secondary education system
• Students visit schools and consider national influences, state standards, and local cultures that contribute to the profession. 
• Students are exposed to essential elements required in the lesson planning process. They visit schools and interview practicing teachers.
• Students take their experiences learning about lesson planning, and translate them into a lesson summary that they teach to their peers.
• Students visit a school to see teaching in action and combine this with their own teaching experiences to reflect on classroom teaching.

Inquiry-Based Lesson Design 

Prerequisites: SCI 2010, Credit Hours: 1, Field Experience: Observations and 2 lessons delivered

This course builds content knowledge within STEM disciplines and gives students practical experiences to implement pedagogical tools in secondary classrooms. 

• Students continue to explore education and have specific field experiences in a middle school environment. 
• Students conduct observations taught by a STEM mentor teacher, and then plan and teach two inquiry-based middle school lessons with a partner. 
• Students demonstrate their own content knowledge in developing inquiry lessons. 

The Step 2 course emphasizes designing inquiry STEM lessons with a focus on developing appropriate questioning strategies throughout the lessons to encourage student-led inquiry. 

• Students are introduced to exemplary instructional methods or educational practices to assist them as they prepare to enter the field of education.
• Students analyze student artifacts and make plans to modify the lessons taught. 
• Students provide rationale from a content and implementation perspective of any lesson modifications, and reflect on feedback from their mentor teachers and the course instructor who observed the lesson.

Inquiry-Based Teaching

Prerequisites: None, Credit Hours: 2, Field Experience: School visits, classroom observations, 2 lessons delivered

SCI 2012, often referred to as Combo, is a combination of SCI 2010 and SCI 2011. This course is designed for sophomore students who are just finding out about the GeauxTeach program and want to stay on track to graduate in the next 4 or more semesters. As the title suggests, it includes elements from both Step 1 and Step 2. Students meet for one hour, twice per week, for this two credit hour course. 

• Students explore the field of education and have specific field experiences in a middle school environment. 
• Students conduct observations taught by a STEM mentor teacher, and then plan and teach two inquiry-based middle school lessons with a partner. 
• Students demonstrate their own content knowledge in developing inquiry lessons, then go out into the middle school and teach those lessons.

SCI 2012 emphasizes designing inquiry STEM lessons with a focus on developing appropriate questioning strategies throughout the lessons to encourage student-led inquiry. 

• Students are introduced to educational practices to assist them as they prepare to enter the field of education.
• Students analyze student artifacts and make plans to modify the lessons taught. 
• Students provide rationale from a content and implementation perspective of any lesson modifications, and reflect on feedback from their mentor teachers and the course instructor who observed the lesson.

Knowing and Learning in Mathematics and Science

Prerequisites: None, Credit Hours: 3, Field Experience: None

GeauxTeach’s Knowing and Learning course is intended to focus on knowing and learning in secondary mathematics and science as understood from a multi­disciplinary perspective. The course stands on the premise that formal research on knowing and learning in mathematics and science has emerged, in itself, as a robust line of inquiry and design. This line of inquiry has tended to be situated relative to classroom practice and draw on significant insights from many fields of inquiry, including psychology, anthropology, critical literacy, sociology, biology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, developmental theory, artificial intelligence, and the domains of mathematics, science, and computer science proper.

This course is not simply a general survey of theories of mathematical knowing and learning. 

• Knowing and Learning is to provide students with the opportunity to identify theories and employ these theories to guide their own practice. 
• Students work to adopt teaching practices that build on theory and experience. Any teaching practice is guided by some theory of how people learn.
• Students are challenged to be thoughtful and reflective practitioners.

Reading in the Content Area

Prerequisites: None, Credit Hours: 3, Field Experience: None

GeauxTeach students take EDCI 3136 concurrently with the Residency, EDCI 4006. The purpose of this course is to explore how literacy is embedded across all content areas. Students are exposed to different literacy strategies and work to implement them in their teaching experiences. Content area reading problems and solutions will be explored, and students take a deep dive into the reading process, approaches, skills and materials.

Classroom Interactions

Prerequisites: EDCI 2500 and Step 1&2, Credit Hours: 3, Field Experience: Once per week *SPRING ONLY

• Students participate in several learning activities and consider how the activities reveal and change their own understanding before implementing similar activities in high school classrooms. 
• Students evaluate their own learning and understanding of a subject. 
• Students are able to see their subjects from the perspective of a novice and to consider how different perspectives might affect the same curriculum as EDCI 3550 brings together students from different disciplines.  
• Students consider equity issues through participating in learning activities.
• Students consider the implications of deficit thinking (for example, blaming the student) in classroom outcomes.
• Students are given the opportunity to each in a high school.
• Students  reflect on and evaluate their own work as teachers.

Instructional Models for Mathematics & Science (Residency I)

Prerequisites: EDCI 3550, Credit Hours: 3

Instructional Methods is the capstone course in the sequence of required education courses. It is an exciting and intellectually challenging experience that pulls together the major themes of the GeauxTeach Program:

• integrated content of mathematics and science learning,
• infusion of technology in representation,
• analysis and modeling,
• assessment and contextualization of the content,
• field-based experiences,
• and equity.

Whereas in Classroom Interactions, students gain experience designing a sequence of several lessons that they teach to a high school class.

• Students design full units of connected lessons—a skill that is required during teacher residency.
• Students manage lessons and students outside a classroom, in a residency setting.
• Students choose from a variety of appropriate teaching styles, depending on the type of material and the learning objectives, with project-based instruction being just one possible alternative.
• Students incorporate various technologies into their unit plans.
• Students will be fully prepared for their teacher residency.

Residency II

Prerequisites: EDCI 4500, Credit Hours: 9, Field Experience: Full Semester

An underlying philosophy of the GeauxTeach program is that with extensive, individualized, and ongoing coaching, preservice teachers’ skills will improve at an accelerated rate. In addition to the mentoring provided by the classroom teacher to which the teacher residents are assigned, trained supervisors with considerable teaching experience observe and provide extensive feedback. 

• Teacher residents assume teaching responsibilities quickly in their final year as a student because apprentice teachers have taught at various levels in previous GeauxTeach courses.
• Teacher residents concentrate on teaching lessons each week in which they demonstrate competency of the particular state standards.

The purpose of the residency is to offer GeauxTeach students a culminating experience that provides them with the tools needed for their first teaching jobs. Students are immersed in the expectations, processes and rewards of teaching. When making placements, each teacher resident’s characteristics and abilities as well as the cooperating teacher’s teaching and mentoring styles are taken into consideration. The goal is that the complementary strengths of the GeauxTeach teacher resident and cooperating teacher will generate a synergism that benefits both people professionally.

• Teacher residency reinforces and augments teaching strategies that students have developed through their coursework and field experiences. 
• Teacher residency allows for remedying any gaps in a student’s professional development.
• Teacher residency focuses on:
  
  • classroom management and time management strategies,
  • parent/teacher communication strategies, 
  • school culture and school dynamics that make up an effective middle school and high school system, 
  • legal and logistical issues in teaching, 
  • the final portfolio, 
  • and state certification examinations.

The goal of the residency is to provide the experiences, information, and coaching that will enable these students to be successful teachers who are leaders in their schools and communities.

Science Teaching in Secondary School III: Instructional Strategies in the Sciences 

Prerequisites: SCI 2011, EDCI 2500, Credit Hours: 1, Field Experience: Assist the TA in college introductory lab course 

How to teach high school level laboratory courses, including instructional strategies, laboratory management, safety. Focuses on preparation to teach high school level AP laboratory courses.

Science Research Methods

Prerequisites: EDCI 2500, (or registration in) EDCI 3550, Credit Hours: 3, Field Experience: None

Focusing on the tools that scientists use to solve scientific problems, including use of experiments to answer scientific questions, experimental design, use of statistics and mathematical modeling of scientific phenomena; oral presentation of scientific work and a minimum of ten hours of work in area middle and high schools.