Journal of Elementary Science Education

, Volume 19, Issue 1, pp 57–68 | Cite as

School’s in for summer: An alternative field experience for elementary science methods students

Article
Accepted:

Abstract

Field experiences are critical to teacher learning and enhance the effectiveness of methods courses; however, when methods courses are offered in the summer, traditional school-based field experiences are not possible. This article describes an alternative campus-based experience created as part of an elementary science methods course. The Summer Kids’ Inquiry Program in Science (SKIPS) provided an authentic context in which teachers had the opportunity to plan and instruct science lessons in both whole-class and small-group settings, as well as observe the teaching of their peers. This model allowed us to overcome many challenges to implementing traditional field-based experiences.

Keywords

Teacher Education Preservice Teacher Science Teacher Prospective Teacher Pedagogical Content Knowledge 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Southwestern Bell Science Education CenterUniversity of MissouriColumbia

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