Teacher Practice

There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However, there are limited instruments that can be easily administered and scored on a large scale to assess and study elementary science teachers' CKT. Such measures would support strategic monitoring of large groups of science teachers' CKT and the investigation of comparative questions about science teachers' CKT longitudinally across the professional continuum or across teacher education or professional development sites. To address this gap, this study focused on designing an automatically scorable summative assessment that can be used to measure preservice elementary teachers' (PSETs') CKT in one high-leverage science content area: matter and its interactions.

Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have not yet been examined as a potential tool for supporting the learning of teacher educators. In this paper, we conceptualize a set of design heuristics to guide the development of educative curriculum materials for teacher educators.

Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have not yet been examined as a potential tool for supporting the learning of teacher educators. In this paper, we conceptualize a set of design heuristics to guide the development of educative curriculum materials for teacher educators.

Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) partnership program, which provides instructional resources and a network of support for high school physics teachers through a partnership with the University of Illinois.

This descriptive case study examines the process of productively navigating socio-emotional risks and interpersonal tensions encountered by a veteran and pre-service physics teacher during one episode of discussing physics content.

The Innovate to Mitigate (I2M) project poses challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible, innovative strategies that mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Design is informed by research on problem-based learning, pedagogy for which poses demands on teachers. This paper presents preliminary evidence about how I2M teachers supported student teams to engage in science and engineering practices.

The Innovate to Mitigate (I2M) project poses challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible, innovative strategies that mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Design is informed by research on problem-based learning, pedagogy for which poses demands on teachers. This paper presents preliminary evidence about how I2M teachers supported student teams to engage in science and engineering practices.

In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing.

Teacher–teacher feedback is an important feature of professional learning. However, deeply ingrained socio-pedagogical norms may affect both the nature and content of feedback, constraining its effectiveness. Prior studies have reported that avoiding critique and providing excessively generic information can hinder pedagogical inquiry and adoption of reform-based instruction. To better understand the nuances of socio-pedagogical norms for chemistry-specific settings, we investigate the conversational functions and the ways in which teacher–teacher feedback addresses macroscopic, symbolic, and particulate levels of representation within lessons they experienced as students.

The authors are developing a model for rural science teacher professional development, building teacher expertise and collaboration and creating high-quality science lessons: technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS).