AAPT Summer Meeting 2012, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Presentation Manuscript

Thank you, Prof. Poel.

Good morning, everyone!

My name is Wu Weining, an associate professor coming from Hubei University in central China. Presently, I am on my sabbatical at Physics Department of SUNY-Buffalo State. My host professor is Dr. Dan MacIsaac. He is also one of my two co-presenters. The other co-presenter is my colleague, Mr. Ding Yimin, but for various reasons, he couldn't come today.

It's my pleasure to be invited by AAPT to give the presentation about physics teacher preparation program of Hubei University.

Today, we are going to talk about topics like this......

First of all, let me introduce the requirements for physics teacher in Hubei.

Basically, in Hubei, and actually in most provinces of China, secondary physics

teachers are expected to have a diploma of bachelor of science, majoring in

physics education especially. These physics education majors automatically

obtain teacher qualification certificate when they get their diploma. For those

physics-major applicants who have never taken pedagogy and PCK courses, a

teacher qualification certificate issued by provincial educational authority is

needed.To obtain the certificate, applicants must take several tests in terms of

pedagogy and psychology. Usually, applicants prepare the test by either

attending special training courses or self-learning.The two mentioned

requirements are formal. In practice, there are also informal requirements by

employing schools. One of those is teaching experience which is usually

tested by a short episode of classroom teaching demonstration (display). The

Other informal requirement by schools is that applicant be good at

problem-solving, or rather, numeric-exercise problem-solving.

Next，let's see physics teacher preparation program of Hubei University.

Generally,......

Specifically,......

For core credit hours in physics, total requirement is 56. Concretely,......

For educational courses, total requirement is 40 cr. Concretely,......

Well, Let me explain undergraduate thesis a little bit. Thesis writing usually

lasts for 6 months. It often takes three steps. First of all, students choose the

topics from the topic-list announced by different faculty members. Once a

student chose a topic, he/she chose the faculty member who announced the

topic as his/her adviser. Then, students meet their advisers regularly to get

advices about their thesis. Finally, students end up with a thesis with a title, an

abstract (both in Chinese and English version) and body of the thesis.

Furthermore, they are required to defence for their thesis. Excellent thesis will

be recommended to attend excellent-student-thesis award selection at both

school and provincial level. The following are some sample topics of the thesis.

......

In addition to above two types of courses, we have other fundamental courses

Like mathematics, English and computer which are also required for

graduation. The total credit hours for this part is 45. Specifically, ......

Actually, we also have two-year master of education program both for

pre-service and in-service teachers. Basically, there are two kinds of courses

for the program. One is degree courses and other is non-degree courses.

Degree courses are specified by the Ministry of Education of the Central

Government. And non-degree courses are set up by graduate section of our

university. Specifically, ......

As most of you are physics educators, you may be interested in what is going

on in PCK education at Hubei University. So let me talk about it a little

more.......PCK credit hours' requirement is 3. It is taught by my colleague, Mr.

Ding Yimin. The main topics of this course is as follows......

Let's move on.

This table shows the general course comparison between Hubei University and

Buffalo State College.......

Finally, I'd like to talk a little bit about some reflections on our physics

teacher preparation program: its achievement and challenges

In a sense, students under the program end up with good basic knowledge of

physics and good performance during high school physics teaching internship.

In addition, our students won a lot of awards in various kinds of national

student teaching competitions. But all these achievements are based on the

conventional standard for physics instruction. Do they really know what

physics is? Do they have the ability of solving real physics problems rather

than numeric exercises? Do they have enough PCK to conduct real

scientific-inquiry-based instruction in the classroom settings? All these

questions are need to be answered. And actually, these questions are the

challenges that we meet today! It is the right time that we make some change

in physics teacher preparation!

Thank you for your attention!

Any questions or comments?