Providing chemistry teachers with opportunities to enhance their knowledge in contemporary scientific areas: a three-stage model

Abstract

In order to help teachers to bring their students into contact with the frontiers of chemistry, a special program for enhancing chemistry teachers' content knowledge as well as their pedagogical knowledge was launched at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The program, which was specifically designed for the chemistry teachers, consists of three stages, in which the teachers attended (1) the course lectures, together with the regular M.Sc. students, (2) a ‘Follow-up’ tutoring lesson, which was prepared especially for them by one of the staff scientists and was aimed at elaborating on the course lecture, and (3) a workshop coordinated by a researcher from the science teaching group, in order to apply the scientific knowledge to the educational field. The model reduced the teachers’ anxieties resulting from taking academic scientific courses; they gained modern and advanced scientific content knowledge, and succeeded in applying it in their teaching.