At numerous colleges and universities, schools of education are scrambling to develop more effective methods of training new teachers and to draw more prospective teachers into STEM fields, an effort that takes on new urgency as the Common Core State Standards are implemented. The UTeach program developed at the University of Texas-Austin is in 34 universities so far and is proving very successful at attracting teacher candidates and providing both deep content knowledge and intensive field experience. And in a new report, the American Federation of Teachers suggests creating something akin to a comprehensive legal bar exam for aspiring teachers to assess their competency in educational knowledge and classroom performance. This session will explore what changes are needed in STEM teacher ed at the undergraduate and graduate levels and identify models of math and science instruction that hold promise.
