Alternative Pathways to Physics and Science Certification

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Faculty of SUNY Buffalo State College (BSC), SUNY Jamestown Community College, Buffalo Public Schools, the BSC Center for Excellence in Urban and Rural Education, and other SUNY colleges throughout New York State are working to create, institutionalize and populate model programs and opportunities necessary to significantly increase the number of preK-12 teachers who are certified and well-qualified to teach physical science and physics. This project improves the quality of pre-service teacher preparation, and continued professional growth for teachers in Western New York and throughout New York State. This project is making particular efforts to recruit and support under-represented and minority populations into the teaching profession via the provision of targeted scholarships, assistantships and student wage opportunities. Project activities include significant expansion of BSC graduate summer workshop courses in physics and physical science content. These courses are taught via reformed teaching pedagogy to create a summer academy of graduate credit courses offered to as many as 90 teachers and teacher candidates each summer. Project instruction reinforces the development of standards-based, student-centered constructivist-inquiry teaching strategies and Physics Education Research (PER)-informed pedagogical methods. Summer academy offerings support a variety of alternative tracks to certification. Project activities also include developing and promoting a chain of experiences extending from grade school through master teacher experiences promoting physics and science teacher recruitment, preparation, certification, induction, professional development and support. The project is creating a set of teacher preparation models transferable both to other colleges and universities specializing in teacher preparation and will be published and disseminated in journals and at relevant local and national conferences.