Lessons learned from a pilot study: Understanding the processes preservice teachers use to write lesson plans

An important part of any teacher preparation program is the process of planning and writing lessons. Lesson planning is important to the growth of preservice teachers, because it helps teachers think through all the necessary pieces of teaching an exemplary lesson. Knowing how preservice teachers write lesson plans will inform the support that teacher preparation programs provide. For this study, data was collected from a group of junior level STEM education preservice teachers to understand their lesson plan writing process. Specifically, we wanted to know where preservice teachers struggled in the process. To accomplish this goal, we collected the preservice teachers' lesson plans, reflections, log of their steps, and screen capture video. Because the data collection was coupled with the preservice teachers' class and we did not want to interfere with the course, we were not able to collect a full set of data from each preservice teacher. Since we did not have a full data set from each preservice teacher, we were not able to address our main research question: "What are the processes preservice teachers use when to write a lesson plan?" Despite not being able to address this question, we were able to begin to understand the challenges preservice teachers face when writing lesson plans and develop an improved protocol for data collection so that we are able to address our initial research question in future studies. This paper will describe the value in each type of data we collected, the rubric we developed to assess students' lesson plans, the challenges preservice teachers faced, and our plans for future studies based on the outcomes of this pilot study.