A Workshop Approach to Pre-service Physics Teacher Education

In many countries science teachers are expected to teach students both scientific knowledge and competencies. The importance attached to the mastery of scientific practices waxes and wanes, but for the last thirty years or so many government policy documents have emphasized the importance of inquiry-based science education as a way to teach scientific practices. In theory, inquiry is the way scientists work and the way students learn to think and act scientifically. In the classroom, all too often “inquiry” is essentially a relabeling of tightly scripted teaching focused on the acquisition of facts and the execution of step-by-step procedures and algorithms. This state of affairs poses serious challenges to pre-service science teachers (PSTs) and their educators. We know that teachers tend to teach the way they were taught; therefore teacher education programmes should broaden teachers’ views of what is possible and desirable in the classroom. This chapter discusses a study of PSTs enrolled in a second-year undergraduate module that forms part of a concurrent four-year Bachelor’s degree programme, in which they simultaneously study education, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. A workshop approach in which PSTs first carry out and then critique inquiry activities was developed that allowed the PSTs to broaden their views of science teaching, while at the same time allowing researchers to investigate their views of science teaching.