Touchstones for Teaching Teachers

PERHAPS the most significant feature of the current efforts to improve the curricular offerings in secondaryschool science and mathematics is the interest shown in the problem by scientists and mathematicians in higher education and industry. Possibly this interest has always been there, lying dormant, but now these men and women have had machinery provided which not only allows secondary-school teachers and supervisory personnel to meet and discuss their problems with scientists but also has permitted scientists to work with the schools in developing new programs which are being tried in the classroom. In biology, the central effort toward the development of new secondary-school courses is being directed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. The BSCS is sponsored by The American Institute of Biological Sciences, representing more than 80,000 biologists, and is supported financially by grants from the National Science Foundation. Quite independently of the BSCS instructional materials, a number of schools have developed excellent programs of their own. The increasing number of schools throughout the country that will be doing something significantly different in biology instruction over the next several years presents a real challenge to the colleges whose job it is to prepare teachers who will be trained to do a competent job in these new programs. It now behooves any institution of higher learning, which has as one of its roles the preparation of teachers of biology for the secondary schools, to recognize quickly the import of the revolution that is occurring on the secondary level and to participate in a searching self-examination to see whether it is indeed ready to assume the responsibility for preparing teachers of these new curricular offerings. It is too often assumed that the colleges and universities are naturally the educational pacemakers in a given field of science. But this can be true only as long as colleges continue to improve their own science programs in response to new stimuli from both scientific and educational sources. I think we must admit that, in a number of institutions now preparing teachers, the biology programs have tended to become ossified. The course offerings have not changed essentially in a generation. They still have a taxonomic-morphological orientation, emphasizing nomenclature and descriptive organic diversity at the expense of the study of basic concepts which stress features common to all living matter. Introductory college biology which consists primarily of an extensive survey of the plant and animal kingdoms is hardly defensible today. The morphology of organisms and their classification are of course important, but they should not be studied as if they were the essence of the subject to the exclusion of the physiological, genetic, developmental, ecological, behavioral and evolutionary aspects of living matter. It seems appropriate to suggest several questions which teacher-training institutions might ask themselves and which might make a productive, if embarrassing, outline for discussion when college and secondary-school people sit down together to consider their problems in this area.