This study explores ways in which university science courses can be infused with opportunities for pre-service teachers to design student student interactions that promote language development and content mastery. Participants included bilingual pre-service teachers enrolled in an elementary science approaches course and its school-based fieldwork component. Participant reflections reveal a positive response to integrating collaborative learning to develop scientific thinking with young bilingual learners. This research lends additional insight into the directions that teacher preparation programs must take to better serve prospective bilingual teachers and an increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse schoolage population.