Developing Preservice Teachers' Knowledge of Science Teaching Through Video Clubs

Though an adequate understanding of content is a natural prerequisite of teaching (Carlsen in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 30:471-481, 1993), teachers also need to be able to interpret content in ways that facilitate student learning. How to best support novice teachers in developing and refining their content knowledge for teaching is a crucial and ongoing question for preservice teacher educators. Recently, video clubs are being explored as potential contexts for teacher learning (Barnhart & van Es in Teaching and Teacher Education 45:83-93, 2015; Sherin & Han in Teaching and Teacher Education 20:163-183, 2004). We hypothesized that pairing video clubs with student teaching experiences would provide a forum for preservice teachers to discuss issues relevant to their professional trajectory through exposure to models of peer teaching and opportunities to reflect on practice. In this study, we explored how secondary science preservice teachers used video club to restructure their overall science knowledge into science knowledge for teaching. Our findings suggest that video clubs allowed preservice teachers to access and leverage student thinking and instructional resources to deepen their understanding of science content and trajectories for science learning.