Interacting with a suite of educative features: Elementary science teachers' use of educative curriculum materials

New reform documents underscore the importance of learning both the practices and content of science. This integration of practices and content requires sophisticated teaching that does not often happen in elementary classrooms. Educative curriculum materials—materials explicitly designed to support teacher and student learning—have been posited as a way to support teachers to achieve these ambitious goals, yet little is known about how elementary teachers actually use educative curriculum materials in their interactions with students. To address this gap, we used qualitative case study methods drawing mainly on videorecords of the enactments of lessons and teacher interviews to investigate how two fourth‐grade teachers enacted a curriculum unit enhanced with educative features. Evidence of language and teaching moves promoted by the educative features was observed in the teachers' enactments. Findings suggest that variation existed in the teacher–curriculum interactions within and across teachers and across the suite of educative features. The teachers drew on educative features that contained representations of teacher and student work to envision possibilities for teaching the lesson while they used other features for identifying main ideas for the lesson. Implications for curriculum developers and teacher educators are discussed based on the patterns found in the teachers' use of the educative curriculum materials. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 53: 422–449, 2016