New standards for K-12 science education task science teacher educators with providing preservice teachers strong preparation that will help them to embrace their role as teachers of science literacy (National Research Council, 2012). Even though there is a growing trend for teacher preparation programs to offer literacy courses that focus on reading in the content areas, often they do not provide aspiring science teachers the science-specific tools needed to teach reading in secondary science contexts. This article addresses the question, "How can we, as science teacher educators, prepare our teacher candidates to teach reading in the context of science?" We designed an initial literacy lesson to help preservice teachers enrolled in two science methods courses to unpack their content knowledge about literacy in science. Our hope was that by unlocking their personal strategies they would be better positioned for engaging in conversations about literacy. We found that using this initial literacy lesson provided our preservice teachers with a solid foundation for engaging in conversations about how to scaffold student reading. This lesson also provided preservice teachers an opportunity to collaboratively develop a common beginner's repertoire of reading strategies that we subsequently used as a building block for designing activities and lessons that engage middle and high school students in big science ideas and understanding real-world phenomena through reading a variety of kinds of science texts.
The following article describes a lesson that was originally implemented in a high school chemistry classroom for the purpose of teaching students about density and was subsequently revised in order to teach preservice science teachers about inquiry and the practices of science. Lesson plans turned in after the experience revealed that preservice teachers demonstrated an understanding of the importance of allowing students to engage in the practices of science in order to construct their own meanings of natural phenomenon prior to being provided with an expected result. Practical examples of how science investigations can be modified for the purposes of science teacher preparation are included.
This partnership between a college and a science center addresses the need to improve the recruitment and preparation of science teachers in an urban setting. We describe the integrated teacher preparation model where undergraduate science majors simultaneously participate in the City College of New York science teacher preparation program and serve as interns on the museum floor at the New York Hall of Science. We report on how graduates of our program are prepared to teach science and how they performed in the classroom. We found that the program was successful at recruiting students from the communities in which they intend to teach and successful at preparing them to teach inquiry-based science.