Dr. R. McGinnis

FINAL EXERCISE

Note: This is a take home performance exercise that should be worked on independently of others. The Honor System applies. The criteria for evaluating your response are completeness and quality.

Directions: Please respond to the following scenario. Limit yourself to no more than three typed or word processed pages (1 inch margins, font no smaller than 12, double spaced). Feel free to use your class notes and the readings in EDCI 372 to help you with your response. The due date for this final is December 11, 1996, noon. Early submissions may be turned in to Ms. Elaine Henry, rm. 2226 Benjamin during office hours -- 9am to 4pm (you will need to sign a sheet giving the time and date you submitted the paper).

Scenario

You have successfully finished your methods block and started the student teaching experience (congratulations!). One Monday morning, the principal of your school walks in and states she has received a call from the University of Maryland at College Park and needs your help in responding to it. Specifically, UMCP would like the principal to give a talk at a meeting for prospective cooperating teachers throughout the district. She tells you that she feels secure in talking about the methods preparation student teachers get in their undergraduate program (since she graduated from UMCP herself and taught reading methods there for 2 semesters a few years ago). However, she has heard from other administrators in the district that science methods at UMCP has a professor, a Dr. R. McGinnis, who is actively trying innovative things as a member of the Maryland Collaborative for Teaching Preparation (MCTP) to prepare teachers to teach science for the 1990s and beyond. Therefore, since you were in his class, she asks that you prepare a concise report based on ideas in his class that she could use to help her prepare her talk.

Components of the Report:

(1) A concise summary of the current thinking concerning the teaching of science on the elementary/middle-level which you learned in your university science methods class (include the dominant theories and a brief description of teaching techniques that you learned and practiced during class and in class assignments that supported those theories);

(5 pts; 1 1/2 to 2 pages)

(2) A concise summary of how you would teach a specific science topic (you pick it) to students that clearly shows the influence of theory, instructional practices, and practical ideas that you recently learned in your science methods class. (5 pts; 1 to 1 1/2 pages)

Later that night, you pull out all your EDCI 372 materials, think back over the semester's experience in class (using the class syllabus to jog your memory of all the topics you learned in each week of class) and begin typing your report for the principal....