Designing Educative Curriculum Materials to Promote Teacher Learning

Abstract

Curriculum materials for Grades K-12 that are intended to promote teacher learning in addition to student learning have come to be called educative curriculum materials. How can K-12 curriculum materials be designed to best promote teacher learning? What might teacher learning with educative curriculum materials look like? The authors present a set of design heuristics for educative curriculum materials to further the principled design of these materials. They build from ideas about teacher learning and organize the heuristics around important parts of a teacher's knowledge base: subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge for topics, and pedagogical content knowledge for disciplinary practices. These heuristics provide a context for a theoretically oriented discussion of how features of educative curriculum materials may promote teacher learning, by serving as cognitive tools that are situated in teachers' practice. The authors explore challenges in the design of educative curriculum materials, such as the tension between providing guidance and choice.

The development of preservice elementary teachers' curricular role identity for science teaching

“…Embedding features that are explicitly educative for teachers who use the curriculum materials (Ball & Cohen, 1996;Davis & Krajcik, 2005) will help these materials speak to teachers rather than through them (Remillard, 2000), thus making the teacher -curriculum relationship more productive. For example, narrative vignettes associated with teachers' use of particular science curriculum materials can support preservice elementary teachers' developing pedagogical design capacity for inquiry-oriented science teaching (Dietz & Davis, in press).…”

“…For example, narrative vignettes associated with teachers' use of particular science curriculum materials can support preservice elementary teachers' developing pedagogical design capacity for inquiry-oriented science teaching (Dietz & Davis, in press). These and other educative supports embedded within curriculum materials can help preservice teachers learn to employ principles of inquiry-oriented science teaching over time and across settings (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). Better understanding the types of educative supports that can best support teachers at various stages along the teacher professional continuum is an important area for future research (Dietz & Davis, in press;Schneider & Krajcik, 2002).…”

Does audience matter? Comparing teachers’ and non-teachers’ application and perception of quality rubrics for evaluating Open Educational Resources

“…This allowed them to better understand which OER better facilitate learning, suit certain students, and integrate into the curriculum. Thus, teachers perhaps wanted more flexible rubrics so that they could adjust the ratings of an OER based on students' different backgrounds or educational contexts (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). Similarly, teachers also understood the importance of educational standards in the modern classroom and the importance of aligning teaching materials.…”

Large‐scale interventions in science education for diverse student groups in varied educational settings

“…Teacher knowledge and skills can be developed through a combination of effective professional development (Desimone, 2009;Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001) and educative materials embedded in the curriculum (Davis & Krajcik, 2005;Remillard, 2005). As an added layer of complexity, in culturally and linguistically diverse school contexts, strategies for linguistic and cultural scaffolding must also be integrated into the process of teacher learning (Lee & Maerten-Rivera, in press;Moje, Collazo, Carillo, & Marx, 2001).…”