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teaching practices that emphasized a lot of teacher direction-giving to a more student-centered classroom where students were actively engaged in critical thinking. As a former middle school science teacher, and later as a university science teaching methods instructor, I spent years learning how to create effective and worthwhile inquiry investigations. The organization of the classroom and the various student activities was what I found to be most difficult. I often tell my preservice science teachers that it took approximately five years of practice as a science teacher for me to feel that I had mastered the art of creating inquiry experiences for my students. Learning to teach using inquiry pedagogy did not happen overnight. It was a sophisticated process that required practice and reflection along the way with the support of colleagues who were also attempting to change their teaching practices. Later, I was lucky enough to teach in the Iowa City Community School District, which adopted an issues and inquiry-based science curriculum (Science Education for Public Understanding Program) that allowed me to focus my time on the engagement and cognitive development of the student, providing consistent and detailed feedback for students and raising my expectations for my students’ learning, rather than spending my time developing and tweaking science curriculum. With an inquiry-based science curriculum, I no longer felt the need to constantly revise and create these experiences by modifying traditional curriculum. However, I knew that this was an unusual case, as many colleagues of mine, from different school districts, were (and are) still in the position of either teaching very didactically (due to personal preference or outside pressures from colleagues, parents and administrators) or constantly searching and creating inquiry experiences from the modification or deviation from their traditional curricula, similarly as I had earlier done. Now as a professor of science education, I need to prepare future teachers to enter a relatively challenging world