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Teaching in elementary and secondary school is based on state and national standards. These standards encompass the major bodies of knowledge, concepts, and skills that you will be responsible for teaching in middle school and high school. This means that you must demonstrate your competencies in each of these areas prior to teaching.
Future teachers need to develop the intellectual framework to recognize and ask good questions, develop investigations into them; consider possible solutions and consequences; separate evidence-based claims from parochial opinions; and communicate and act upon what they learn. And most importantly, they must possess the capability and commitment to repeat that process as long as is necessary. Teachers need to acquire the discipline-specific tools for analyzing, interrogating, and evaluating the content and concepts contained in their courses in order to recognize relationships among the disciplines as well as applying this knowledge to addressing challenges that occur in today’s world.
The Inquiry and Analysis Portfolio requires you to investigate selected courses that you are taking, identifying compelling and supporting questions that drive the course content, as well as the disciplinary methods, tools and habits of mind that are essential to each discipline. These course elements appear in many places within a course: daily lectures, activities, assignments, assessments, and projects. Course syllabi and the instructors themselves are valuable resources for identifying and evaluating questions and disciplinary methods and tools.
