The curriculum marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) claims that 85% of educators in the United States use the site. Despite substantial evidence that TPT offers low quality materials, little research has explored the impact of TPT on curriculum-making. We analyze 76 TPT seller sites from assignments submitted by teacher candidates in an…

Given the myriad mandates and policies related to math and language arts education, U.S. public elementary teachers must "care about" teaching science for it to actually happen. Consequently, this study sought to explore the impacts of assignments in a science methods course supporting teacher candidates (TCs) in "caring about"…

This article describes a literacy methods course designed to introduce reading specialist candidates to research-based practices for comprehension instruction. Specifically, this article focuses on a sequence of assignments and class sessions within that course that introduced theoretical perspectives about comprehension processes and how those…

This case study was conducted in Fall 2020 with two Elementary Education pre-service teaching candidates. The goal of the study was to better understand how students in this course developed new insights about teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic through their successful design of comic strip narrative artwork. The students created comic strips…

Curriculum materials are integral to the mathematics classroom, yet little is known about how teachers read curriculum in order to envision enactment. Through an assignment involving an approximation of actual teaching practice, we investigated prospective teachers' documentational genesis (Pepin et al. in ZDM 45:929-943, 2013) from curriculum…

In response to the dearth of research on K to 6 teacher preparation for teaching writing, we investigated writing methods course instructors' course assignments. Participants' courses met the following criteria: (a) Courses taken by undergraduate elementary teacher candidates; (b) Writing methods courses; (c) Use of exemplary writing instructional…

In this collaborative self-study, teacher educators/researchers in four different geographic, social, and cultural institutions of higher education implemented Culturally Proactive Pedagogy (CPP) learning events into their undergraduate literacy methods courses. Conceptually, this study used the Pose, Wobble, Flow (P/W/F) framework developed by…

This study investigates the relationship between measures of user activity within a Learning Management System (LMS) and student performance during a series of Virtual Field Experience (VFE) online learning modules. Implemented in a graduate-level course on teaching methods for learners with mild/moderate disabilities, each VFE activity was…

In response to the COVID 19 pandemic, universities and colleges closed abruptly and teacher educators had little time to move instruction from face-to-face classrooms to digital learning environments. This sudden shift created a myriad of obstacles as instructors worked to retain pedagogically sound and effective instruction through online…

This paper describes the long-term re-development of an introductory graduate research methods course. The initial design is presented, followed by the two re-design phases. Phase 2 introduced additional inquiry-based strategies such as concept mapping and multiple levels of peer collaboration. Phase 3 incorporated competency-based techniques as…

This paper reports on an investigation into the effectiveness of teaching research methods in library and information science (LIS). A review of the literature revealed that the LIS community is engaged in a continuing debate about the most effective means for teaching research methods courses in master's-level LIS programs. Many LIS master's…

There is an urgent need for primary and secondary students to develop awareness, knowledge, attitudes, and an environmental ethic necessary to undertake environmental issues and problems. The need to adequately prepare teachers to teach about the environment, and the challenges the field of environmental education (EE) faces lead us to the…

Contextualized in the critical pedagogies of universal design for learning (UDL) and social justice education, our study aimed to equip teacher candidates (TCs) to provide students with equitable access to learning social studies content knowledge, skills, and processes as a way to equally empower all students to be civically engaged, and thus to…

To better prepare physical education (PE) teachers, this study explored a group of pre-service teachers' understanding, application, and development of critical thinking (CT) in a capstone methods course. Participants were 12 pre-service teachers from a PE teacher education (PETE) program at a large university in the southwestern United States.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate current secondary woodwind, brass, and combined wind instrument methods courses for preservice music teachers across the United States. Two-hundred eleven (N = 211) wind methods course instructors from National Association of Schools of Music-accredited institutions completed an online survey that…