This section on teacher education begins with Bruce Partridge and George Greenstein asking the question What should we teach? Goals for astronomy courses.

Each year, more than 250,000 North American university students study astronomy. Few of these continue in the field professionally; many will go on to be secondary schoolteachers. What sorts of learning should survey courses in astronomy encourage? Two national meetings were held in 2002 to develop a list of goals for introductory survey courses in astronomy. The list of goals presented below was arrived at by consensus involving both astronomers from leading research universities and well-known science educators. While they were intended for university astronomy courses, it may be that they would be of interest also to those teaching astronomy or related physical sciences at the secondary school level. Note their generality (they were not focused on specific content items like galaxies or Newton's Laws). Nor were they intended to be a prescribed curriculum for introductory astronomy courses. Instead the set of goals developed in these meetings emphasizes deep learning, development of general skills, and good understanding of a limited number of general scientific principles, rather than broad coverage.