In our mathematics methods courses for elementary preservice teachers, we work to uncover and confront students' understandings as well as misconceptions about important mathematical topics. Karp and colleagues' ("Teaching Children Mathematics", 21(1), 18-25) "13 Rules That Expire" article has been a useful resource for us to…

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…

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…

National science education documents emphasize new learning outcomes of elementary students; therefore, the preparation of elementary teachers should be revised to meet these challenges. This article describes how science educators at a large southeastern university developed specialized science training for elementary preservice teachers (EPSTs)…

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…

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…

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…

The use of quality texts in elementary classrooms plays a major role in children's literacy development. Quality children's literature helps learners develop into skilled readers and writers with increased gains in vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. This paper demonstrates how pre-service teachers gained an understanding of the educational…

This study describes a personal science story podcasting assignment that was developed to help preservice teachers reflect on their use of everyday and academic vocabulary in the context of science, as well as how to communicate effectively with their students. Podcasting assignments were collected from 16 elementary education candidates and nine…

This study investigated the influence of immersive classroom simulation activities on the development of elementary pre-service teachers in two separate mathematics and science education courses that simultaneously focus on pedagogy and content. Participants submitted written personal reflections about their teaching experiences using the…

Mathematics methods texts are important resources for supporting preservice teachers' learning. Methods instructors routinely assign readings from texts. Yet, anecdotally and also based on reading compliance literature, many students report that they do not read assigned readings. Within this paper we briefly describe the findings from a survey of…

We used the Multicultural Mathematics Dispositions (MCMD) framework to analyze preservice teachers' (PSTs) dispositions to teach diverse student populations during a cultural awareness unit in a mathematics methods course. The framework is defined as a function of three constructs: openness, self-awareness/self-reflectiveness, and commitment to…

The current impetus for increasing STEM in K-12 education calls for an examination of how preservice teachers are being prepared to teach STEM. This paper reports on a study that examined elementary preservice teachers' (n = 21) self-efficacy, understanding of science concepts, and computational thinking as they engaged with robotics in a science…

This article describes how two instructors used assessment data to improve an undergraduate course, Teaching Social Studies in the Elementary Classroom. This entailed revising the core assignment for the course--the creation of a thematic unit of instruction--and developing a scoring guide to assess teacher candidates' performance. Data collected…