The modeling approach is used to prepare students to become responsible citizens and face the challenges and demands of modern times, mainly when they engage in modeling activities using digital tools. This study investigates the features of digital tools used in modeling processes among prospective teachers. Thirty-two prospective mathematics…

In this study, we aim to examine the phases of inquiry-based learning and how to best prepare future teachers for inquiry-based teaching. While preservice teachers may leave teacher preparation with an understanding of the tenets of inquiry, their experiences in methods courses and experiences teaching in the field do not adequately prepare them…

How teachers interpret and express fractions critically influences their teaching and their students' fraction knowledge. Internationally, the mathematics education community has been studying ways to enhance preservice elementary teachers' rational number knowledge, particularly fractions. To address the challenge of augmenting pre-service…

Research has shown that teachers and students have difficulties in connecting climate change evidence with climate change claims. Such difficulties may come from the lack of knowledge about how scientific models and modeling work in climate science. Climate change as a complex system with a large time and land scale requires sophisticated…

Understanding, crafting, and asking questions is a critical skill for all teachers, maybe even more so for social studies content, an area where educators may lack broad, in depth knowledge of the content. Having the ability to ask high level, critical thinking questions of students takes time and practice and a skill not often mastered or present…

Scientific modeling is a scientific practice that uses models to prepare elementary and middle school science teachers to engage students using scientific inquiry. Model-based inquiry (MBI) is a pedagogical teaching approach that engages students using scientific inquiry during scientific modeling. However, preservice teachers lack understanding…

The science teacher education community plays a prominent role in teacher preparation programs. Particularly, science methods courses emphasize modeling instructional strategies to promote inquiry-based practices. Integrating appropriate educational technology to enhance and support classroom practices should be embedded in these courses. The…

Worldwide, teacher educators and policy makers have called for teacher preparation that is more deeply linked to practice. Yet we know little about how such linkages are achieved within different international programs. We examine the degree to which programs provide opportunities to learn that are grounded in practice, during university…

This paper discusses the ways in which teacher educators can effectively engage prospective teachers (PTs) in lesson study during mathematics methods courses. Evidence from this work suggests that engagement in lesson study provides PTs with opportunities to strengthen their knowledge about mathematics, students, and pedagogy. More specifically,…

It is now required for teachers to incorporate computational thinking (CT) into their science classes. Our research modifies the existing structure of a science methods course for preservice teachers to include CT via modeling and simulations. In the first study, preservice teachers were introduced to the basics of coding through an Hour of Code…

This article describes The Bare Book Project, a writing and research project that challenged pre-service and in-service teachers to create their own original pieces of children's literature, and use aspects of their personal writing as models for students in elementary school classrooms. Building on research regarding teacher modeling in writing…

Many teachers are using the Five Practices model to guide them in orchestrating whole-class mathematics discussions that focus on understanding: (1) anticipate an array of possible student-generated solution strategies to a mathematical task before implementing the lesson; (2) monitor students' work as they grapple with the task; (3) select a…

In this article, we share a framework for the purposeful design of presence in online courses. Instead of developing something new, we looked at two models that have helped us with previous instructional design projects, providing us with some assurance that the design decisions we were making were fundamentally sound. As we began to work with the…

In this article, we explain how the Discipline-based Art Education Model (DBAE) represents an instructional tool to disturb teacher candidates and elementary students' commonly held notions of US history, motivate research into historical events, and revise understandings of historical topics so that they begin seeing how the past has shaped the…

This work presents a proposed model in blended learning for a numerical methods course evolved from traditional teaching into a research lab in scientific visualization. The blended learning approach sets a differentiated and flexible scheme based on a mobile setup and face to face sessions centered on a net of research challenges. Model is…