CNAS GOALS 2000 PROGRAM

    The College of Education (COE) and the College of Natural and Applied Sciences (CNAS) are involved in a cooperative project that is looking for ways to improve the preparation of teachers to teach science. Secondary science teachers are now required by state law to have a unified science teaching certification. This means that everyone must take a general core of science courses, followed by an endorsement area in the discipline of the student’s choice.
    The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) thinks that the need for specific training in science areas is so important that they have allocated federal funds to MSU to create new approaches to the preservice training of teachers, who will need to be able to teach science. The MSU Goals 2000 – Preservice Science Team has been working since 1997 to determine just what secondary schools need and how education students need to be prepared to meet those needs.
    While some work was done with a few beginning teachers during the 1997-98 academic year, a full-fledged pilot of these new approaches got underway in the Fall, 1998 semester. The Goals 2000 Team is looking for entering Freshmen who have a strong interest in secondary science teaching to take on the challenge of these new approaches.  In return for a student’s involvement with the secondary portion of this project, a number of benefits are received.
   Among these benefits are:

    Upon receipt of a unified certificate, graduates may be required to teach in all science areas. Since that is quite an assumption, the MSU Goals 2000-Preservice Science Team is redesigning the core science courses and curriculum to make sure this certification from MSU really means that graduating students will be prepared to teach all of the sciences. This program provides all students with the background to be a specialist in hands-on science teaching at any grade level from 9-12.