Course Descriptions

Step 1: Inquiry Approaches to Teaching

Step 1 invites students to explore teaching as a career at no cost. In Step 1, students teach science or math lessons in elementary classrooms to obtain firsthand experience with planning and implementing inquiry-based curriculum. Master teachers teach Step 1, so students have direct access to people who love teaching and who believe that teaching is a rewarding career choice. A low-so­cioeconomic-status elementary classroom provides the future teachers with a first taste of teaching in a supportive, diverse environment.

An introduction to the theory and practice necessary to design and deliver ex­cellent inquiry-based science and mathematics instruction provides the scaffold for the early field experience. The GeauxTeach instructor or master teacher and the elementary school mentor teacher emphasize both inquiry and classroom management techniques.

Step 2: Inquiry-Based Lesson Design

In Step 2, the second course for which GeauxTeach offers a tuition rebate, students who want to explore teaching careers become familiar with the middle school environment by observing and discussing middle school culture and by teaching several lessons to a middle school class. Students build on and practice lesson design skills developed in Step 1 while also becoming familiar with excellent science or mathematics curricula for the middle school setting. A significant number of GeauxTeach students enjoy their teaching experiences in middle schools to the extent that they decide to pursue teaching in the middle grades. As a result of the Step 2 experiences, students generally are able to make a decision about whether they want to pursue a pathway to teacher certification through the GeauxTeach program.

The Step 2 course emphasizes writing good 5E lesson plans, with a focus on the importance of using appropriate questioning strategies throughout the lesson. Students develop pre- and post-assessments for performance objectives. For their final product, students analyze and modify one of the lessons they taught, taking into account the results of the assessments, their reflection on how suc­cessful the lesson was, and feedback from their mentor teachers and the course instructor who observed the lesson.

Knowing and Learning in Mathematics and Science

A traditional certification program typically includes, early on, a general-pur­pose educational psychology course. While similarly placed in the GeauxTeach pro­gram, the Knowing and Learning course was developed as a significant alterna­tive to such an all-inclusive, all-things-to-all-people course. Rather than pursue very general claims about knowing and learning across disciplines and ages and rather than being based on only one formal perspective (educational psychol­ogy), 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. Some now call this integration of domains a “learning science” perspective.

This course is not simply a general survey of theories of mathematical knowing and learning. Instead, the primary goal of Knowing and Learning is to provide students with the opportunity to identify theories and employ these theories to guide their own practice. GeauxTeach is committed to the idea that practice and theory build on each other. Any teaching practice is guided by some theory of how people learn. If students are not aware of this, they are likely to adopt teaching practices without considering the full implications of theory behind them. GeauxTeach wants its students to be thoughtful and reflective practitioners.

Functions and Modeling

Functions and Modeling is a requirement for math majors in the GeauxTeach program.

In this exploration of secondary mathematics concepts, prospective mathematics teachers are expected to do the following:

A point is made to cover content that is traditionally glossed over by second­ary teachers but is essential to preparing students for university mathematics courses. This slighted content includes parametric and polar objectives, linear and matrix algebra, regression aspects of statistics, and growth and decay expo­nential models.

Classroom Interactions

The Classroom Interactions course continues the process of preparing students to teach mathematics and science in upper elementary and secondary settings. The specific objectives of this course are to:

Classroom Interactions begins with the assumption that students have con­ducted and analyzed a number of clinical interviews in science and mathematics as part of Knowing and Learning. Students must understand that the process of concept acquisition must encompass learners’ prior formal and informal knowl­edge, the importance of task construction in eliciting student thinking, and the critical role of reflection and language in the construction of knowledge. Whereas in Knowing and Learning, students study the meaning behind under­standing a particular content area from an individual perspective, in Classroom Interactions, the perspective shifts to studying how classroom events might promote or discourage learning mathematics and science and student equity.

In Classroom Interactions, students typically participate in several learning ac­tivities and consider how the activities reveal and change their own understand­ing before implementing similar activities in high school classrooms. These activities allow students to evaluate their own learning and understanding of a subject. Bringing together students from different disciplines (for example, science, math, and computer science) allows them to see their subjects from the perspective of a novice and to consider how different perspectives might affect the same curriculum.

Participating in learning activities also allows students to consider equity issues. For example, is it fair for only the fastest students to contribute to an activity? How would learning be different if all students were not only allowed but required to participate? Is it fair that some students are learning in a language that is not their first? The class considers the implications of deficit thinking (for example, blaming the student) in classroom outcomes.

The culminating activities of the course are the opportunities for students to teach in a high school and to learn whether they enjoy and are good at it. A major component of the Classroom Interactions course is the opportunity for students to reflect on and evaluate their own work as teachers.

EDCI 4500 Instructional Models for Mathematics & Science

Instructional Methods is the capstone course in the sequence of re­quired education courses and is required before GeauxTeach students student teach. Instructional Methods is the course in which the major themes of the GeauxTeach program—integrated content of mathematics and science learning, infusion of technology in representation, analysis, modeling, assessment and contextu­alization of the content, field-based experiences, and equity—converge into an exciting and intellectually challenging culminating experience.

Whereas in Classroom Interactions, students gain experience designing a se­quence of several lessons that they teach to a high school class, in Instructional Methods, students design full units of connected lessons—a skill that is required during student teaching. This also provides students with the experience of managing lessons and students outside a classroom, in a field setting.

The Instructional Methods course emphasizes choosing 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. In addition, this course requires students to incorporate various technologies into the units they plan.
When students complete Instructional Methods, they are fully prepared for Apprentice Teaching.

Logic, Science & Society (Perspectives)

Many math and science students are surprised to learn that math and science have a history at all; so far as they know, math and science have simply been handed down in textbooks. To discover that science has been accomplished by different kinds of people, for different kinds of reasons, in different kinds of places, can be truly mind-boggling, and, for many students, illuminating. Science is not just a matter of finding out the predetermined right answer! While some students are irked or even frightened by this discovery, others find it liberating.

Perspectives has several interlocking purposes:

Research Methods

Most scientists agree that learning about science has two aspects: 1) learning material that has already been established (for example, the structure of DNA, how to find forces on blocks being pushed up a ramp, the definition of an acid) and 2) learning how scientists gained this knowledge (for example, how new discoveries gain authority and are adopted by the scientific community, how to evaluate scientific claims when they conflict, how to design and carry out investigations to answer new questions). Most high school and college science courses are mainly devoted to learning material already established. Education of how scientists gained this knowledge has traditionally been exclusive to graduate school. GeauxTeach believes scientific literacy for all citizens in a democratic society incorporates factual knowledge with an understanding of the scientific process. Therefore, these skills should be addressed at secondary and undergraduate level.  

Research Methods simultaneously provides students specific techniques needed to address scientific questions and an example of how to provide this sort of training for students through individualized instruction.

The purpose of this course is to present GeauxTeach students with the tools scien­tists use to solve scientific problems. These tools enable scientists to develop new knowledge and insights, the most important of which are eventually presented in textbooks and taught in conventional science classes. These tools include use of experiments to answer scientific questions, design of experiments to reduce systematic and random errors, use of statistics to interpret experimental results and deal with sampling errors, mathematical modeling of scientific phenomena, and oral presentation of scientific work.

Research Methods is primarily a laboratory course, and most of the topics covered are developed in connection with four independent inquiries GeauxTeach stu­dents design and carry out. It is also a substantial writing component class, and the written inquiries students produce are evaluated as examples of scientific writing.

Secondary School Reading in Content Subjects

The content and focus of the course is the use of reading strategies exclusively in the content areas of science and mathematics. This course is required for stu­dents pursuing secondary science or mathematics teaching certificates. Secondary School Reading in Content Subjects enables students to be per­ceived as and educated to be both subject specialists and teachers of reading.

Science and mathematics teachers have historically focused on content acquisi­tion rather than the competencies required to enable content acquisition. The purpose of literacy is to increase the learning of critical content. In this course, science and mathematics teachers must shift their thinking about curriculum design and delivery, moving away from simply covering the available content to instead focusing on organizing curriculum experiences around compelling critical content and then developing plans and teaching routines which ensure that all students master that content.

One of the goals of an educational system is to help students become more stra­tegic readers. A reading program that implements successful comprehension instruction increases students’ interest and success in reading, providing students the intrinsic motivation needed for continual learning. Learning to read and reading to learn are interrelated processes that lifelong learners use to refine and expand what they currently know and believe about the world.

Student Teaching

An underlying philosophy of the GeauxTeach program is that with extensive, indi­vidualized, and ongoing coaching, pre-service teachers’ skills will improve at an accelerated rate. The GeauxTeach Student Teaching program is an important part of this coaching. In addition to the mentoring provided by the classroom teacher to which the apprentice teachers are assigned, trained observers with considerable teaching experience observe and provide extensive feedback. Because apprentice teachers have taught at various levels in previous GeauxTeach courses, they assume teaching responsibilities quickly in their final semester as a student. Student teachers concentrate on teaching lessons each week in which they demonstrate competency of the particular state standards.

The purpose of Student Teaching 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 student teacher’s characteristics and abilities as well as the cooperating teacher’s teaching and mentoring styles are taken into consideration. The hope is that the complementary strengths of the GeauxTeach student teacher and cooperating teacher will gener­ate a synergism that benefits both people professionally.

Student Teaching reinforces and augments teaching strategies that students have developed through their coursework and field experiences. The program also attempts to fill in any gaps in students’ professional development. In par­ticular, Student Teaching 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.

GeauxTeach student teachers explore professional development opportunities beyond the classroom, including attending conferences, subscribing to educa­tion journals, joining professional organizations, and conducting presentations in educational settings. The goal of Student Teaching 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.