ABSTRACT
The traditional way of teaching at universities and colleges is delivering a lot of information to large groups of students via lectures. These are followed up with small group tutorials, and in the sciences, laboratory work, where the lecture material is reviewed, practiced, and confirmed through
experiments. This mode of teaching began in medieval days when information was mostly in the head of the Professor, who wrote the lecture notes that were then read to students by a Reader. Tutors in turn ran the tutorial groups where the information was revisited, and Demonstrators demonstrated to students the laboratory experiments referred to in the lectures. Many universities still organize classes in similar ways. University administrators all too often assume that a science methods class will operate the same way as the sciences. However, as Noeline mentioned, such an arrangement can be counter-productive, and is not a model conducive for effective student learning in the methods course setting. In particular, it draws on a form of pedagogy that is no longer considered appropriate for teaching prospective elementary science teachers. In this chapter, we explore alternative instructional strategies that can be used in elementary science methods courses, which are based on an instructor’s pedagogical content knowledge for teaching science teachers.
