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The importance and value of high quality opportunities to authentically practice teaching is key for new teacher development. Unfortunately, securing high quality field experiences for preservice teachers is an ongoing problem for many teacher education programs. This article describes how we used our own university-level science content courses to provide preservice teachers with robust teaching experiences through teaching internships. We share our insights from engaging interns for the last 10 years as well as the key elements of the internship experience from the perspective of former interns. 

The article explains how teachers can use existing media sources to develop high school students’ scientific literacy. Lucas worked on the article during an independent study course he took as part of his Noyce-funded MAT degree. 

While much is known about teacher learning of nature of science (NOS) concepts, less is known about how teachers develop an understanding of how to effectively teach NOS or how instructional views might differ across levels of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) wheel. Therefore, this study investigated the NOS instructional views related to different levels of the FRA wheel of preservice secondary science teachers as they completed a semester-long NOS course. At four times during the semester, data was collected through written documents and interviews about NOS instructional views. Participant NOS instructional views were evaluated in terms of three aspects of NOS teaching: explicit, reflective, and role of context (McComas et al., 2020). In terms of the explicit and reflective components of NOS instruction, participants generally progressed from utilizing inaccurate representations of NOS to inclusion of accurate implicit messages, and finally to explicit reflective instruction often mimicking course activities. As the semester progressed, their questioning also moved toward targeting more specific NOS aspects. As far as the role of context, participants moved from treating NOS as its own topic to a more embedded approach. Other findings include that preservice teachers tended to use more abstract and contextualized activities for social institutional aspects of NOS as opposed to concrete and moderately contextualized activities for cognitive-epistemic NOS. Features of the NOS course may account for some aspects of the learning progressions observed.