Many student-teachers think that a teacher's job is to cover the material presented in a textbook. Hopefully, after this module is enacted, they will have realized that teachers should not "teach" a textbook; they should adapt and modify existing material from numerous sources so that the materials they use provides their students with the best support pupils in achieving pre-specified learning goals.

This module is intended to assist instructors of secondary science methods courses in introducing student-teachers to:

A. The importance of curriculum materials in shaping classroom activities and supporting student learning.
B. The Project 2061 criteria as measures of curriculum quality.
C. Considerations in selecting, adapting, and enacting curriculum materials.

The module provides student-teachers opportunities to use the criteria in evaluating and modifying existing materials.

The module addresses 6 of the 22 criteria developed by Project 2061. The 6 criteria addressed in this unit are:

Category I, Criterion B - Conveying Lesson/Activity Purpose
Category II, Criterion D - Addressing Students' Ideas
Category III, Criteria A - Providing a Variety of Relevant Phenomena
Category IV, Criterion C - Representing Ideas Effectively
Category V, Criterion A - Encouraging Students to Explain their Ideas
Category VI, Criterion B - Probing Student Understanding

The module is intended to be used by the course instructor as a supplement to existing course material.

The design of the module assumes that the student-teachers are in field placements and have access to:

A. Chemistry That Applies by Michigan Science Education Resources Project. A PDF of Cluster 3 from the unit can be downloaded if the full unit is not available.
B. Teacher journals such as The Science Teacher, Science Scope, and The Physics Teacher.
C. Science units taught in the field placement classrooms.

It also assumes that the student-teachers have already learned about the importance of naive conceptions, formative assessment, representations, contextualization, and cooperative group work in learning.

The module includes approximately 4 hours of instruction and 15 hours of homework.

The Instructor’s Guide contains all the information needed to use the module.