A Community-Based Approach to Building the Capacity of Physics Teacher Preparation

具有科学素养的人口和劳动力对国家未来的健康至关重要，必须继续努力确保STEM领域的高中教育具有最高质量。拥有物理学学位并将自己视为物理专家的高中物理教师数量严重短缺。这个问题在该国较贫穷的农村地区更为严重。该项目将通过建立一个由当地高中和社区大学的物理学生和教师组成的社区来解决德克萨斯州东北部农村的这个问题。这个社区将为正在攻读物理教育学位的学生提供支持。社区将专注于共享活动；开发教材来解决大多数学生感到困难的物理概念。这些材料将免费提供，将有助于支持物理教育专业的学生和高中物理教师，并导致物理教师产量的增加。该项目的目标将是让最近在物理和天文学系以及课程和教学部实施的一些与教师教育有关的项目的参与者建立一个实践社区。这些项目将包括将基于微积分的物理课程切换到工作室模式，并在这些课程中创建学习助理计划，为在职高中物理教师提供新的物理学硕士计划，以及德克萨斯州教师常驻计划，该计划为学生提供津贴，让他们在获得教育硕士学位的同时，与导师一起被安置在STEM教室。驻校教师(TIR)将帮助项目团队从参与这些项目的学生和教师那里建立社区，并将以创建高中物理和大学入门物理课程的教材为基础，这些教材针对概念困难的领域，提供公共教学资源，并为参与者提供在课堂上进行行动研究的机会，以衡量这些模块的学习结果。该项目还将继续正在进行的德克萨斯A&A；M-Commerce物理教师培训计划的改革，以允许物理教师通过使用最佳实践教学法的课程高效地完成该计划，并降低招聘门槛。最终目标将是发展一个了解物理教育研究的教师和学生社区，可以获得免费的教材，并最终增加德克萨斯州持有物理学位的教师的供应。

A scientifically literate population and workforce is essential for the future health of the country, and continual efforts must be made to ensure high school education in STEM fields is of the highest quality. There is a dramatic shortage of high school physics teachers who have a degree in physics and count themselves as physics specialists. This problem is more acute in poorer and rural areas of the country. This project will address this issue in rural North-East Texas by building a community of physics students and teachers from local high schools, and community colleges. This community would provide support for students in the physics education degree. The community will focus on a shared activity; development of teaching materials to address physics concepts most students find difficult. These materials will be made freely available, and will help support both physics education majors and high school physics teachers, and lead to increased production of physics teachers. The goal of the project will be to create a community of practice from participants in a number of recently implemented projects related to teacher education in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. The projects will include the switch of calculus-based physics courses to studio mode and the creation of a learning assistant program in those classes, a new Master's program in Physics for in-service high school physics teachers, and the Texas Teacher Residency Program which provides stipends for students to be placed in STEM classrooms with mentor teachers while obtaining an education Masters. A Teacher-in-Residence (TIR) will help the project team build the community from students and teachers involved in these projects, and will base the community around the creation of educational materials for high school physics and college introductory physics courses which address areas of conceptual difficulty, provide communal teaching resources, and provide opportunities for participants to perform action research in their classrooms to measure the learning outcomes of those modules. This project will also continue the ongoing reformation the physics teacher preparation program at Texas A&M-Commerce to allow physics teachers to efficiently complete the program via courses that use best practice pedagogy, and to lower barriers to recruitment. The ultimate goal will be to develop a community of teachers and students informed by physics education research with access to free teaching materials, and ultimately increase the supply of physics-degree holding teachers in the state of Texas.