Chair's Guide for Establishing Teacher Preparation

What are the critical steps I need to take to establish, or strengthen a high school physics teacher education program? Over the past 5 years, the American Physical Society has been developing a guide for department chairs to help them establish and build components of excellent undergraduate physics programs. The document will be partially released in 2018, with completion of all initial components by 2019 including a guide to program assessment. In this workshop we will briefly review the section on teacher preparation, and consider how to use this to improve components of such programs, as well as to use the guide more broadly to build excellent undergraduate physics programs. The workshop will allow time to build departmental action and assessment plans that can be used more broadly in either regional accreditation or external program review – an exercise required of nearly all departments on the 5-10 year timeframe. While the guide is written for chairs, anyone can learn from the action-oriented recommendations.