Virginia Law

The program in technology education shall ensure that the candidate has demonstrated the following competencies:

1. Understanding the nature of technology, including knowledge of the following:

a. Characteristics and scope of technology;

b. Core concepts of physical, biological, and informational technologies; and

c. Relationships among technologies, including the natural intersects between science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and other fields.

2. Understanding the relationships between technology and society, including the following:

a. Sociocultural, political, and economic influences of technology;

b. Local and global effects of technological products and systems on the environment;

c. Role that society plays in the use and development of technology; and

d. Influence of technology on human history.

3. Comprehension and utilization of engineering design, including the following:

a. Attributes of technological design;

b. Role of constraints, optimization, and predictive analysis in engineering design;

c. Requirement of problem-solving, critical thinking, and technical writing skills; and

d. Intentional integration of mathematics and science concepts and practices.

4. Ability to succeed in a technological world, including a capacity to:

a. Employ the design process in the engineering of technological products and systems;

b. Determine and control the behavior of technological products and systems;

c. Use and maintain technological products and systems; and

d. Assess the impacts and consequences of technological products and systems.

5. Ability to select and use the major physical, biological, and informational technologies of the designed world, including the following:

a. Principles and processes characteristic of contemporary and emerging transportation, manufacturing, and construction technologies, inclusive of research, engineering design and testing, planning, organization, resources, and modes of distribution;

b. Range of enabling technologies that utilize fundamental biological principles and cellular processes characteristic of traditional and modern biotechnical technologies, including research, design-based engineering and testing of agricultural products, biotechnical systems, and associated medical technologies;

c. Purpose, processes, and resources involved with creating, encoding, transmitting, receiving, decoding, storage, retrieval, and understanding of information data using communication systems in a global information society; and

d. Concept, laws, forms, and characteristics of energy as a fundamental requirement of the technological world, inclusive of the resultant power and work requisites, both renewable and nonrenewable, of the tools, machines, products, and systems within.

6. Knowledge, skills, and processes required for teaching in a STEM laboratory environment, including:

a. Laboratory safety rules, regulations, processes, and procedures;

b. Ability to organize content and practices into effective instructional units;

c. Ability to deliver instruction to diverse learners;

d. Ability to evaluate student achievement, curriculum materials, instructional strategies, and teaching practices;

e. Ability to incorporate new and emerging instructional technologies to enhance student performance across the varied domains of knowledge - cognitive, affective, and psychomotor; and

f. Ability to convey the concepts and procedures for developing a learner's technological literacy specifically and integrative STEM literacy in general.

7. Demonstration of the knowledge, abilities, and capacity necessary to teach leadership skills, organize and manage an effective co-curricular student organization, and implement the organization's activities as an integral part of instruction.

8. Understanding of and proficiency in grammar, usage, and mechanics and their integration in formal technical writing.

9. Understanding of and proficiency in pedagogy to incorporate writing as an instructional and assessment tool for candidates to generate, gather, plan, organize, and present ideas in writing to communicate for a variety of purposes.

10. Demonstrate and integrate workplace readiness skills in the classroom and real-world activities.

11. Ability to plan, deliver, evaluate, and manage work-based learning methods of instruction such as internship, job shadowing, cooperative education, mentorship, service learning, clinical, and youth apprenticeship.