STEM Week Continues

Out of Texas comes a possible model for how to train science and math teachers, both to improve practice and to increase the number that choose to go into the classroom. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Many high-school chemistry students would probably love a teacher like Robert A. Gonzales.

During a class at James Bowie High School here last month, he asked his students to figure out the alignment of atoms within different molecules — using marshmallows. Put the tiny, white sweets, representing different atoms, on toothpicks, he suggested, and build a little model that shows the shape when charged atoms repel each other.

The students got busy, giggling. They were stumped on one molecule, ammonia. Mr. Gonzales, who majored in chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, demonstrated the right configuration by balancing on one leg, his arms spread to either side, head cocked down. The students laughed some more — and listened.

Mr. Gonzales credits their attention, and his creative approach that attracts it, to the preparation he received from an acclaimed, unusual program at Austin called UTeach. Congress and the National Academy of Sciences have singled out UTeach in recent years as a promising model to help fill a national shortage of qualified schoolteachers in science and mathematics. The program has doubled the annual number of Austin's bachelor's-degree recipients certified to teach those subjects in secondary schools.

Now UTeach has a chance to go national. Last month a foundation backed by ExxonMobil announced that the UTeach model had so much promise that the group would make grants of $2.4-million each to 12 other universities to copy it.

It sounds like a good idea.