Introduction to education: looking forward and looking back on education

Seminars: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

There are no prerequisites for this course.

The MIT/Wellesley Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) prepares MIT and Wellesley College students to become teachers who are:

[Learn] = Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. The National Academies Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780309070362.

[Schooling] = Graham, Patricia Albjerg. Schooling America: How the Public Schools Meet the Nation's Changing Needs. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780195315844. [Preview with Google Books]

[Tinkering] = Tyack, David, and Larry Cuban. Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Harvard University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780674892835. [Preview with Google Books]

This course is designed as the first semester of a two course sequence that introduces MIT students to K-12 teaching and learning. This sequence may be followed by an additional three course sequence involving student teaching that leads to state licensure.

These courses are designed to provide students with maximum exposure to different teaching and learning styles, and provide them with encouragement and support as they pursue their interests in teaching. The course emphasizes the benefits of a constructivist approach, and the merits of hands-on, project-based, collaborative work. All too many traditional education courses lecture to the students about the virtues of such hands-on constructivist approaches. Instead this course in turn takes a hands-on constructivist approach so that students may experience these methods while they learn about them. This approach sometimes confuses students who are not used to such methods. The second semester explicitly addresses these issues, and students consistently demonstrate understanding of this material in their own practice teaching.

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