Welcome to the BuCKETS project! We are excited to share how we developed and implemented a physics course for elementary preservice teachers. We are nearing the end of our project and would love to learn where viewers think we should go next with this work.  

It's exciting to see teacher training programs take advantage of their opportunities to change pre-service teachers' attitudes about both content and pedagogy! Hopefully these transformative experiences will be transmitted to their students down the line. I imagine finding the right faculty can be a challenge for programs like this. Can you talk a little about where your faculty came from? Were they university faculty who were already engaged in this kind of teaching, or were they instructors with deep K-12 classroom experience?

Hi, Brooke and team! 

It was so inspiring to hear how these pre-service teachers' attitudes about science have changed over their lifetime (and, it's definitely a bit of an added bonus to see students finding new passions and going into secondary science as well).

As someone involved in physics education myself, I'm curious to know a few things:

• How is your approach different from other pre-service initiatives that seem similar to me (lab / tutorial / peer engagement), like Physics by Inquiry (https://www.physport.org/methods/method.cfm?G=PBI), which was created explicitly for teacher education, or even something like Physics and Everything Thinking (https://www.physport.org/methods/method.cfm?G=PET)?
• Did this initiative originate with the faculty themselves? I'm curious to know who identified the "challenge/opportunity" in reforming the course and the methods, and what faculty response was like at the outset. 

Great project and video! Your project is very reminiscent of a similar project we instituted in our physics for future teachers at Cal Poly Pomona some years ago. It had a similar combined lecture/lab approach and also tried to connect the science to the age-appropriate learning goals that elementary school teachers have. As for future directions, I would like to see someone collect information about these types of projects together and publish some kind of analysis of the similarities and differences and evaluating outcomes so that the best practices in this area can be further disseminated to the larger university audience. Overall, nice video and project. 

Hi Brooke,

I really enjoyed watching your video and seeing how things ended up playing out in your project. Your results are very impressive! It sounds like the students are benefitting greatly from the teaching approach — which really isn't a surprise. Thank you for doing the work that your do and for inspiring our next generation of science teachers.

Kathy 

I love the active learning approach with the integration of lecture and lab. Being student-centered is SO important! And you can really tell it was implemented well by the quotes. I especially love the one person who said they can now "see the bright side of science"!

Very cool project! I enjoyed your video, particularly hearing from students who were very deeply impacted by your work. Has the program been equally successful with expanding to other non-science majors as preservice elementary teachers? Were there changes you made to the program when applied to other non-science majors? I'd also be interested to know more about how the program has impacted preservice teachers' classroom practises (for example, if the teachers who participated in the program are more likely to use more active learning methods in their science classes). I would imagine this may be not easy to measure, but it is exciting to consider the widespread impacts that extend beyond the class instructors and preservice teachers to all the students they go on to teach! 

We are finishing up collecting data from a non PST cohort and are excited to see the results. We think we will similar content gains but perhaps not the same excitement for science. We did not change anything else about the program when we did it with all undergrads so it will be interesting to see the differences. 

We would love to be able to measure practice changes in the PSTs but sadly since most were freshmen it would be beyond the scope and length of the project. But, definitely something for us to consider and perhaps look at pursuing in the future!