UWA-TEACH

This course allows students to explore teaching as a career. Following an introduction to the theory and practice behind excellent inquiry-based science and mathematics instruction, students teach lessons in elementary classrooms to obtain firsthand experience in planning and implementation.

This course offers students the opportunity to plan and teach inquiry-based science and mathematics lessons. Students will learn how to develop inquiry-based lessons and are required to teach these lessons to middle school students.

This course combines inquiry approaches to STEM teaching and inquiry based lesson design into a single course for select students. This course is primarily designed for seniors, but it can also be taken with special permission by college juniors.

The goal of this course is for students to construct the model of knowing and learning that they will take with them into their classroom. This course focuses on issues of what it means to know and learn science and mathematics, and students develop a powerful toolkit of relevant approaches.

Students design and implement instructional activities informed by their own understandings of what it means to know and learn mathematics and science, and then evaluate the outcomes of those activities on the basis of student artifacts (i.e., what students say, do, or create). An important focus of Classroom Interactions is on building students’ awareness and understanding of equity issues and their effects on learning. The course introduces ways to use curricula and technologies in classroom settings to build relationships among teachers and students. Students learn how content and pedagogy combine for effective teaching. Field experience required.

Students engage in explorations and lab activities designed to strengthen and expand their knowledge of secondary mathematics topics. Students collect data and explore a variety of situations that can be modeled using linear, exponential, polynomial, and trigonometric functions.

Research Methods simultaneously provides students specific techniques needed to address scientific questions and examples of how to provide this sort of training for students through individualized instruction. The course involves extensive laboratory work and scientific writing.

Students develop an intellectually challenging project-based instructional unit that provides students with the experience of managing lessons and high school students outside a classroom, in a field setting. Integration of mathematics and science content, infusion of technology in representation, analysis, modeling, assessment, and contextualization of content with a focus on designing equitable learning environment are synthesized as students develop an intellectually challenging project-based instructional unit. Field experience is required.

The purpose of the STEM Teaching Internship course is to offer students a culminating experience that provides them with the tools needed for their first teaching position. In STEM Teaching, students are immersed in the expectations, processes, and rewards of teaching. They remain on the school campus a minimum of six hours per day and must complete the STEM Teaching Seminar Course concurrently.

The STEM Teaching seminar provides a supportive environment where STEM intern teachers share their experiences and work on solutions to problems they may be experiencing.