Designing Structured Curricula to Enhance Teaching Competencies: Integrating Teaching Methods Course Clusters in Pre-service Teacher Education

Objective: This study addresses the fragmentation and compartmentalization in the pedagogical training of pre-service teachers, particularly primary education majors, in the context of contemporary educational reform. By adopting a structured framework to holistically redesign pedagogy course clusters, the research systematically enhances teaching competencies among teacher candidates, offering actionable references for educators in normal universities. Methods: The instructing faculty constructs a "four-pronged pedagogical framework" to address prevalent issues in curriculum design, including ambiguous teaching objectives, fragmented content delivery, conventional instructional methods, and overly simplistic assessment practices. This systematic approach encompasses: Objective-driven instruction to clarify student misconceptions, Integrated curricular content for systematic knowledge delivery, Value-embedded pedagogy through diversified teaching modalities, Comprehensive evaluation mechanisms to monitor pedagogical effectiveness. Results: Empirical findings from a five-year teaching practice demonstrate that systematically delivering pedagogy courses through a structured framework significantly enhances pre-service teachers' instructional competencies, deepens their subject matter knowledge and pedagogical understanding, and facilitates the effective application of these skills in authentic classroom contexts. Conclusion: The structured framework-driven approach utilizing pedagogy course clusters has demonstrated efficacy in enhancing pre-service teachers' instructional competencies, though its implementation pathways require sustained collaborative exploration and iterative refinement by normal universities and faculty members.