Developing Teachers as Critical Curators: Investigating Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Inspirations for Lesson Planning

Abstract

Internet resources abound for preservice teacher (PST) use today, but we do not know how they choose and describe their implementation of them. This study investigates 158 elementary PSTs’ lesson plans across eight courses to describe plan inspiration and justification. PSTs reported being inspired by cooperating teachers (CTs), friends and family members, university courses, and Internet resources. In some cases, these PSTs simply followed lesson plans given to them. In other cases, they collected, curated, synthesized, and applied ideas based on inspirations, showing dispositions of New Literacies Theory. This study provides evidence that teacher educators need to engage PSTs in intentionally developing the skills of curation by acknowledging and modeling the depth and breadth of resources, including those that are not necessarily sanctioned. Implications include ways that teacher educators can frame PSTs’ understandings as they critically consume online resources through Critical Curation Theory.

Transformative instruction or old wine in new skins? Exploring how and why educators use HyperDocs

“…Teacher educators could consider how best to prepare future teachers who can both be critical consumers and take advantage of potential benefits of HyperDocs. Today's pre-service teachers draw inspiration for their teaching from a variety of sources, including online resources ( Sawyer et al, 2019 ) such as HyperDocs, and would likely benefit from guidance regarding the effective use and creation or co-creation of HyperDocs.…”

Critiquing, Curating, and Adapting: Cultivating 21st-Century Critical Curriculum Literacy With Teacher Candidates

“…Teachers’ use of sites such as Twitter and Facebook has been heavily researched (Carpenter & Krutka, 2014, 2015; Cinkara & Arslan, 2017; Davis, 2015; Greenhalgh & Koehler, 2017; Manca & Ranieri, 2016; Rehm & Notten, 2016), both in the United States and internationally. Of emerging interest to educational researchers is how preservice and inservice teachers use sites such as Pinterest, TpT, YouTube, and Instagram to support professional learning and classroom curriculum design (Carpenter et al, 2018; Gallagher et al, 2019; Pittard, 2017; Polikoff & Dean, 2019; Sawyer et al, 2020; Sawyer & Myers, 2018; Schroeder et al, 2019). To differentiate these sites from the more generalized language of “online resources,” Shelton et al (2020) have termed these sites (including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, TpT, YouTube, Patreon, Amazon Ignite, and teacher blogs) the TOMI , as teachers use them to share curricular materials sometimes at a cost, sometimes for free, in online spaces.…”

Identifying and Distinguishing Among Teachers’ Supplementary Curriculum Use Patterns Using the Lasso

“…The current study is an application of the Teacher Curriculum Supplementation Framework (TCSF), which conceives of supplementation as: any premeditated, additive change a teacher makes to their official curriculum materials. Under this framework, teachers are assumed to act rationally (i.e., they have reasons for their decisions) but not necessarily to act in the best interests of their students' learning, a point of departure from some other frameworks of teacher curriculum use (e.g., Caniglia and Meadows, 2018;Gallagher et al, 2019;Sawyer and Dredger et al, 2020a). Teachers often supplement their official curriculum materials to help their students learn, but may also supplement for many other reasons, including to save time or to inject new kinds of activities into their instruction.…”