TikTok way – In a classroom assignment built around pre-service teachers’ “creeds” and visual one-pagers, a professor finds future educators are already learning from TikTok—sometimes without research backing. The opportunity is real, but so is the destabilization: teacher
On some mornings, pre-service teachers don’t start their thinking with peer-reviewed research. They start it with a reel.
In a course taught to future educators. the gap shows up in the work students bring back—and in the way they explain what moved them. For every hopeful classroom “I’ll show up with a good attitude” credo written in fancy paper. there’s also a confession that sounds like a warning label: “I know it’s not research-y. but in a TikTok I saw…”.
The instructor is not trying to fight that impulse. Instead, they lean into it—assigning structured projects designed to surface how students know what they know, and whether they can question what they’ve absorbed.
The semester includes two tangible items that ask students to name what they’re carrying into classrooms. and to map how they got there. The first is a teacher creed. Students are given “fancy” paper and told to create something they might read every teaching day—something meant to remind them not if. but when teaching gets hard. The creeds tend to be colorful and heartfelt. filled with early hope that more seasoned educators might scoff at: “I will show up with a good attitude. Even on my worst day, I will be someone’s favorite teacher.”.
The second assignment is a final “One One-Pager to Rule Them All!” Students produce non-linear, doodle-style notes throughout the semester. Then they zoom out and represent everything essential they’ve learned through a map of connections, images, and ideas.
The instructor says the one-pagers make the differences obvious. Some students can connect the dots; others are simply regurgitating text. During “show and tell. ” the instructor sits with each student for five to seven minutes and listens as students read their creeds. The feedback loops back emotionally too—sometimes with tears.
But the content also arrives with friction. As the semester moves forward, the instructor hears the same phrase again and again, close to a confession spoken mid-conference:
“I know it’s not research-y, but in a TikTok I saw…”
“I know it’s not the best source, but I saw a reel that said…”
“This guy I follow always says…”
Instead of arguing with students about whether those posts count, the instructor changes the pressure point. When a claim can’t be backed up in the instructor’s mind with research, the response is question-based: Who created the content? What might their motivation be? Why does it matter to you?
That shift reflects the framework described by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle as “inquiry as stance”—an orientation where teachers act as investigators of knowledge.
The deeper point, though, is bigger than one course assignment. The instructor argues that pre-service teachers are living through an epistemological shift: learning is coming not only from textbooks and peer-reviewed research. but from short-form video. personality-driven content. and lived teacher experience shared in real time.
They link that change to media scholar Henry Jenkins’s description of a more participatory culture of knowledge—one that can democratize education by dismantling the silo that has long kept educational research out of reach. Yet democratization comes with a cost: destabilization. The instructor recalls that during their first years of teaching, they cried in their car a lot. They wonder what might have happened if TikTok had become a megaphone for influencers celebrating how they left education. or if their own teaching had been competing with a similar “content microphone.”.
Some positions do need to be left, the instructor argues. They also point to the reality that educator working conditions “are not what they should be.” The question becomes how pre-service and early-career teachers make it through the “baptism-by-fire years” without being bombarded by a loud stream of outside voices—often from people who have left the profession and narrate it from the outside.
The instructor’s concern is not simply about misinformation. It’s about preparation programs keeping pace with how knowledge is actually being formed. And they return to a question that feels practical enough to be asked on the first day of methods class: “So what? What do we do now?”
They put it in another image—how long do we hack away at the plant growing up the wall, and when is it time to treat the vine-covered building as something worth studying?
Their answer is not dismissal. It’s integration with critical habits. If future teachers are already hearing real-time teacher voices about what happened in classrooms that day. then pretending those voices don’t exist is no longer possible. The charge is different: help future teachers engage these voices critically, rather than burying them.
The instructor lays out ideas they say they are “playing with.” One is “Ed Content Fridays.” Students bring in content that connects with that week’s readings and learning drawn from their own scrolling. The instructor proposes discussion in a Spider-Web format that uses elements of a librarian CRAAP test—meant to build habits of mind around credibility and a content creator’s motivation.
They also suggest using a C3WP writing strategy to kick off class with reels and posts. The approach would start with a free write based on what students already know. then expand into arguments that students defend using research from shared course text. If students bring content in. the instructor says it can be paired with a required citation connection to the course text or researchers.
For classroom ecosystems where social platforms don’t disappear, they propose a more curated version of sharing: “Like/Share/Subscribe.” Strong online content from reputable sources would be shared with students, with syllabi and course hubs treated as places to curate together.
And they propose letting students make the content too—turning short-form production into a structured learning task. They point to CapCut on a desktop or Edits on a phone as “surprisingly easy plug-and-play tools” for making short videos. with academic requirements increased whether or not students post publicly. The goal. in their view. is to bring thoughtful voices from educational research into a space crowded with “pervasive ranting.” They stress that a good rant has a place in reform. but argue that this new way of knowing is already sitting in teachers’ desks waiting for them to “light the fire.”.
The final note returns to a remark the instructor says their father-in-law made at their doctoral graduation. With good-natured humor. he told them: “Well. Ev… there’s a lot of [stuff] you can’t learn from a book.” The instructor agrees—yet keeps turning the idea over. Maybe the real question now is how much can be learned from students in their own ways of knowing. even when teachers don’t fully understand those ways yet.
What’s clear from the classroom assignments. and from the TikTok confessions that show up in conversation. is that future teachers aren’t entering the profession blank. They are arriving already practiced in a new language of knowing. The work now is to help them translate it—into something they can test. question. and use without losing their grounding.
teacher education TikTok pre-service teachers media literacy educational research inquiry as stance Henry Jenkins Marilyn Cochran-Smith Susan Lytle curriculum student assignments