With the introduction of the new two-year Bachelor of Education program across Ontario, our Faculty of Education has introduced a twenty-hour internship. This internship is meant to provide real-world teaching experience for teacher candidates, who are nearing the end of their formal education. By maker pedagogies, we refer to the inquiry-based, student-directed, constructionist approaches to learning typically used in makerspaces. Makerspaces have gained traction in Ontario classrooms, particularly in the last two years. These spaces and their pedagogies facilitate the development of students' global competencies (Hughes, 2017; Somanath et al., 2016). We welcomed eleven teacher candidates (TCs) into our STEAM 3D Maker Lab as part of their internship course for professional development (PD) to provide them with pedagogical experience in a makerspace environment. Our research focused on exploring how the TCs developed a better understanding of maker pedagogies and the associated tools through this PD. As the internship was created and facilitated by an education graduate student in the lab, we extended the research to also investigate this student's development in identifying and understanding some of the best practices associated with making as learning. Through analysis of the TCs' and graduate student's experiences, we identify some best practices in maker-focused professional development for beginning teachers.
Keywords: Constructionism; Inquiry; Makerspace; Making; Pre-service Teachers; Professional Development.