Physics Teachers’ Views on their Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper explores New Zealand (NZ) physics teachers' and physics educators' views about Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Perspectives of physics teachers nationally indicated that in general, teachers considered themselves not well-prepared in some content areas including electronics, modern physics, and atomic and nuclear physics. This may be because in NZ, physics teachers have usually gained their content knowledge from an undergraduate science degree where they may have only taken one or two courses in physics. One year postgraduate teacher education programmes do not have sufficient time to cover the physics content taught in the final three years of schooling. The implications for ITE of physics teachers are discussed in terms of the shifts needed to help them to identify the gaps in their content knowledge and to develop their conceptual understanding of physics.

Physics classroom interactions: Teaching strategies and practices

“…It can be inferred from the findings (Table 1) that students rarely had the opportunity to plan and implement their own designs for experiments as most often students carried out experiments by following pre-determined instructions from teachers. Students' questionnaire data and focus group interviews further corroborated the teachers' questionnaire data (Buabeng, 2015;Buabeng, Conner, & Winter, 2016). As reported by Berry, Gunstone, Loughran, and Mulhall (2001), such an approach to teaching is an ineffective way of developing students' understanding of science concepts, and it also presents a wrong impression of how scientific knowledge develops.…”

“…Also, because of the age of the teachers and when they did their initial teacher training (Buabeng, 2015;Buabeng et al, 2016), student-centred pedagogies and the use of ICT, critical thinking, inquiry etc.,…”

Finnish graduated physics teachers’ views about their teacher education program – The disparity between the needs and delivery

“…Teachers' views about their teacher education showed that they evaluated their education to have prepared them well in terms of knowledge of learners and their development, monitoring and diagnosing learners with accurate helpful feedback concerning their learning, the curriculum goals, and teaching diverse students (Buabeng et al, 2016). With respect to more critical views concerning the education received, it was revealed that teachers did not seem to have gained adequate common content knowledge, understanding and implementing both national and local curricula, and utilizing ICT in their teaching (Buabeng et al, 2016).…”

Can Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity be Taught to Indonesian High School Students?

“…There is also a belief that students studying Einsteinian physics require a solid background in classical physics (Walwema et al, 2016). In addition, most teachers are not equipped with enough knowledge, as well as pedagogical skills, to teach the subject (Buabeng et al, 2016;Yavaş & Kizilcik, 2016). Meanwhile, in Indonesia, the search on the physics education department's curricula revealed that almost all physics education departments don't include the theory of general relativity as a compulsory subject in their curricula.…”