Contact Us

University of California, Davis

The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) is a large, comprehensive public university located in the state’s Central Valley, a region where highly qualified teachers of physical science are in especially short supply. To help meet the needs of the state and the region, the campus has established a Mathematics and Science Teaching (MAST) program as part of the UC CalTeach Science and Mathematics Initiative and provides it with an annual budget of almost $250,000 for instruction and instructional support. The MAST program uses master teachers to provide students with early teaching experiences through three seminars that have concurrent field work in elementary, middle school, and high school classrooms. The program has also established a protocol for recruiting and advising prospective teachers and currently serves 400-500 students per year; however, very few physics teachers graduate from the program.

The UC Davis Department of Physics has an active Physics Education Research (PER) group, and has carried out a number of PER-based reforms on its undergraduate curriculum. These include reforming its  introductory physics series for biology majors, and to a lesser extent the track for physics majors, as well as the TA training for these courses. The department is also planning to to add a teaching track to either its Physics or Applied Physics major, to capitalize on interest among its students in teaching.

Goals

The goals of UC Davis’s proposed PhysTEC program are to:

• Engage 15 undergraduates annually in preparing to become physics teachers;
• Graduate 5 highly qualified physics teachers annually from our credential program;
• Increase the quality of our participant’s subject matter and professional preparation.

Key elements of the site’s plan will be to:

• Hire a master teacher of physics as a Teacher-in-Residence;
• Design and implement a capstone course in active learning and physics pedagogy;
• Offer Learning Assistants a capstone teaching experience in Introductory Physics;
• Establish a Teacher Advisory Group to advise the project and mentor prospective and novice teachers.