Section archive - Preservice Teachers

The purpose of this study is to understand pre-service teachers’ experiences and perceptions of leadership. This inquiry informs the literature on teacher leadership by providing a summary of pre-service teachers’ actions and reflections on teacher leadership while noting the constraints of such mandated activities.

The purpose of the study was to explore five science secondary preservice teachers’ intentions for teaching writing and their experience with the unit of study approach while writing a scientific genre. The study sought to understand how preservice teachers applied the unit of study in the field of science. The participants experienced the unit of study from the stance of a learner, with opportunities to reflect on the assignment from the stance of a teacher. This allowed them to learn more about scientific writing and to develop competence in an instructional approach they could utilize in their future teaching. This study suggests that preservice teachers need explicit conversations about their intentions for teaching writing. Teacher educators need to help preservice teachers view themselves as teachers with expert knowledge of how to write in science.

In this study, the authors report on the results of an empirical investigation of teachers’ understanding of energy. In particular, the focus is placed on pre-service teachers’ ability to employ energy as a framework for analyzing the operation of physical systems. The results corroborate the claim made in the literature that teachers typically do not possess functional, coherent understanding of this principle. Most importantly, the data serve to identify and document specific difficulties that hamper attempts to use energy for the analysis of the operation of physical systems. The difficulties which the authors were able to document lend support to the idea that it is important to introduce the idea of energy degradation alongside the conservation of energy principle.

This study examines changes in preservice elementary teachers’ concern and perceptions about climate change after participation in an intervention situated in an elementary science methods course. Framing was used as a guiding principle for the curriculum development. The findings indicate that the framing approach was successful in promoting more scientific perceptions about climate change. Finally, this study provides preliminary support for the value of providing a careful framing of the topic of climate change within the context of the science methods course.