Elementary Teacher Education

This introductory course in rhetoric emphasizes clear, effective written communication and preparation of the research paper.

This course will examine the major developmental milestones for children, both typically and atypically developing, from conception through adolescence in the areas of physical, psychosocial, and cognitive development. Emphasis will be on interactions between maturational and environmental factors within a culturally sensitive framework. While studying developmental theory and investigative research methodologies, students will observe children, evaluate individual differences and analyze characteristics of development at various stages.

This course introduces students to the concepts and issues related to teaching diverse learners in elementary school classrooms. Topics include teaching as a profession and career, historical and philosophical foundations of the American education system, contemporary educational issues, California's content standards and frameworks, and teacher performance standards. In addition to class time, the course requires a minimum of 45 hours of structured fieldwork in public school elementary classrooms that represent California's diverse student population, and includes cooperation with at least one carefully selected and campus-approved certificated classroom teacher.

This course focuses specifically on Children's Literature, including the value of children’s books to child psychology and development, and the historical construction of childhood. It introduces representative works from major genres, develops students’ close reading and analytical writing skills, and promotes appreciation and critical understanding of the cultural, historical, and aesthetic qualities of literature.

This is a course in public speaking for students learning to prepare and deliver platform speeches. Assignments include speeches of description, exposition, and persuasion. Techniques for controlling tension, building self-confidence, and effective listening are emphasized.

This course is designed for pre-service elementary school teachers. The course examines several content areas: numeration systems (historical development of numeration system, Hindu-Arabic numeration system, and place value systems); integers (structure, basic properties and computational algorithms); basic number theory (divisibility, primes and composites, prime factorization, Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, greatest common divisor, least common multiple); rational numbers (structure and properties, ratio and proportions); real numbers (structure and basic properties, arithmetic operations, rational and irrational numbers, decimal representation, number line representation); problem solving (patterns, connections, modeling, reasoning and representations, strategies, inductive and deductive reasoning); and national and state curriculum standards for elementary school math including Common Core State Standards.