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Abstract
One of the challenges that beginning teachers face is adapting the content knowledge that they know to the content knowledge they will teach. Beginning teachers often leave traditional science education programs unprepared to think about content in the context of teaching. These programs fail to integrate content into the learning of pedagogy. This exploratory case study investigates how an intervention incorporating content into a methods class influences how preservice teachers (PSTs) think about the content they will teach. For the purposes of this study the content knowledge for teaching is called school subject matter knowledge (SMK).The findings of this study indicated that the intervention as implemented was unsuccessful and had no impact on how the PSTs thought about content when planning and implementing a lesson. Suggestions were made to better facilitate content integration into the methods class. It was also found that the priorities that the PSTs held influenced how they thought about content as they were planning their teaching experiences. One participant prioritized teaching life skills, another prioritized lesson structure. Both of these participants were inhibited in adapting SMK to teaching because their priorities held their attention at the expense of content. The last participant prioritized student understanding and exhibited a precocious ability to think about content as school SMK. The intervention in the methods class was unsuccessful in providing integration of content with pedagogy. As a result the priorities of the PSTs played a significant role in lesson planning with content playing a lesser role. It was suggested that if the methods class provided more explicit incorporation of content, content could become a priority in lesson planning. Research in this area could aid teacher education programs better prepare PSTs with the ability to adapt their content knowledge for teaching and therefore be better prepared as beginning teachers.