A TEACHER TRAINING: PHYSICS ENQUIRY FROM UNIVERSITY TO HIGH SCHOOL

In order to reduce the gap between high school and research, the Department of Physics at University of Salerno (Italy) has planned and implemented various training courses for teachers. In particular, we will help teachers to introduce new didactical strategies and specific tools for physics High-schools teaching. From this perspective, the Department has been involved in the European project “Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated” [TEMI], giving to high-school teachers the possibility of a TEMI training. As it is required by this project, as first step a group of thirty teachers has been involved in a four days’ Workshop, which has consisted of sixteen hours of lessons and laboratory activities. In the second step of the project, teachers have been motivated to implement in their own classes some of the activities proposed in the first step, using TEMI methodology. Finally, as a third step, we have discussed a comparison of the results obtained by the teachers into the classes. All these activities have been based on the principles of "Inquiry based science learning” (IBSE).

At all stages, the "Inquiry" methodology has been activated by the university trainers, in order to help teachers to more easily guide their students during the investigation about physical phenomena and to make questions and formulate scientific hypotheses.

In this talk, we will briefly describe the training methodology, giving some examples of the work produced by teachers in their classrooms during our project, with comments and discussion.