Designing Educative Curriculum Materials for Teacher Educators: Supporting Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Content Knowledge for Teaching About 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. We illustrate how these heuristics guided the identification of specific educative features, which we included when developing prototype educative curriculum materials for elementary science teacher educators in content and/or method courses to support the development of preservice teachers’ content knowledge for teaching about matter and its interactions.