Professional Development Is One Part of Science Education Solution

In his letter “Educating Students to Appreciate Physics” ( Physics Today, October 2001, page 11 ), Stewart Brekke makes excellent points about developing high-school physics courses that are more “user-friendly.” There is no curricular magic bullet for motivating students, but there is a magic gun—high-caliber teachers like Brekke. An enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher inspires students to go where they’ve never gone before, leaves them yearning for another trip, and usually manages to avoid being too limited by course materials or administration.

We don’t usually remember our textbooks or the flow of a course that we took. We do often remember our teachers, and may strongly identify the subject they taught with that memory. True, some students are inspired entirely from reading texts and find the teacher nearly irrelevant, but those are a small minority, probably well-served by existing resources.

Writing a finely tuned curriculum can be a validating experience for an inspired teacher, but once the product is adopted, it often ends up serving inflexibly as a crutch for poor teachers and a constraint on good ones. We certainly need competent texts and solid curricula. But the greater need—and the greater challenge—is to develop teacher training that requires really learning the technical subject matter and demands good skills, both teaching and interpersonal. Another important requirement is to filter out those without a spark for teaching before they become protected by a tenure system that is the envy of most other professions. Then we can deal with how much teachers get paid and how burnouts should be handled in a tenure system.