Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Supporting High School Chemistry Teaching This month marks the end of Emory Howell’s five-year term as Secondary School Chemistry editor of JCE. During those five years Emory has worked tirelessly to improve this Journal’s effectiveness in serving high school and pre-highschool teachers. Were it not for his impending retirement from the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi, all of us would have been able to benefit from another five years of Emory’s excellent service as high school editor. He deserves the heartfelt thanks of those who read this Journal and everyone who is concerned about improving science education in the United States. All of us in the editorial office say thanks, Emory, for your dedication, intelligence, empathy, and hard work. You have done a great job, and we really appreciate it. Beginning in January 2002, the high school editorship passes to Diana Mason and Erica Jacobsen. Diana taught high school chemistry in Dallas for a decade, is immediate past chair of the Associated Chemistry Teachers of Texas, carries out demonstration programs and other outreach activities, and has just joined the faculty at North Texas State University. Erica is certified to teach chemistry, physical science, and life science in Wisconsin and Minnesota, taught chemistry, AP chemistry, and physics in Wells, Minnesota, for several years, and has worked in the JCE editorial office on JCE HS CLIC, our special section of JCE Online for high school teachers, and on JCE Classroom Activities. Beginning in the late 1970s when Jim DeRose, Tom Lippincott, Joe Lagowski, and Mickey Sarquis initiated JCE’s current highschool efforts, and continuing for the past five years with Emory, JCE has established a strong tradition of communication with and service to pre-college teachers. Diana and Erica enthusiastically support that tradition and intend to expand and enhance it. Their joint editorship will enable even more time and effort to be dedicated to the Journal’s goal of serving the high school community as well as we possibly can. If you have ideas for improving what we are doing, please communicate them to me, Diana, or Erica. In my September editorial, I noted that the public believes that high-quality teachers constitute by far the most important component of our educational system, and that the demand for chemistry teachers is greater than the supply. Better high school materials in JCE support existing teachers, but all of us should be doing other things as well. One is to support the ACS-approved chemistry education option for certification of undergraduate chemistry majors that has been available for the past decade under the auspices of the ACS Committee on Professional Training (CPT). A program that meets CPT’s criteria will prepare excellent teachers. Unfortunately, both the number of approved programs and the number of students who have received ACS-certified chemistry education bachelor’s degrees are small. CPT is currently reconsidering requirements for such a degree, with an eye to making this program more popular and effective. CPT is also considering whether to set criteria for an ACS-approved chemistry minor intended for those obtaining teaching credentials in a field other than chemistry.
There are sevIf an ACS-certified chemistryeral things each of us can do in support of high school education program appears to teaching and CPT’s be viable at your institution, initiative in this area. First, consider you could lead the effort the existing CPT chemistry educato make it happen. tion option by visiting the CPT Web site for information (http://www.acs.org/portal/Chemistry?PID =acsdisplay.html&DOC=education\cpt\index.html) and discussing the requirements with your chemistry and teacherpreparation colleagues. Could your institution implement such a program? If so, would you be willing to lead the effort to do so? Would one of your colleagues be willing? If CPT has specified too many course requirements to set up a viable program, how could the requirements be eased to make it possible for your institution to initiate a program? Perhaps your investigations will reveal that a chemistry-education degree is not likely to be popular with students no matter how it is set up. In any of these cases, your input to CPT will be valuable and welcome. If an ACS-certified chemistry-education program appears to be viable at your institution, you could lead the effort to make it happen. This will almost certainly involve many discussions with colleagues in your department, throughout your institution, and possibly at the state-government level. It may also involve setting up a new course and learning how to teach it effectively. Finally, once a program exists, it is necessary to recruit students and to make certain that school districts in your state or region are aware of the quality and effectiveness of the program—and therefore hire your graduates. These go hand in hand, because good students will be attracted to a high-quality program that leads to good jobs. It may be difficult to convince school districts to hire bettertrained teachers, because at present the lesser criterion that teachers be certified in the field they teach is not always met. Nevertheless, if all of us were to provide school boards and state certification agencies with evidence of our concern and a brief statement of how they could improve chemistry teaching, it would help a lot. CPT will be considering these issues at a meeting in January 2002. Additional opportunities to react to the outcomes of that meeting will be provided in symposia at the Spring ACS National Meeting in April and the 17th BCCE in July. Send your opinions and suggestions now to the chair of CPT’s subcommittee on the chemistry-education option, Margaret V. Merritt, Chemistry Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481 (
[email protected]). Each of us needs to support high school chemistry teaching as strongly as possible. Please do whatever you can.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 78 No. 12 December 2001 • Journal of Chemical Education
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