Subject Knowledge and a Knowledge Rich Curriculum – Part 1: What knowledge do teachers need?

In a few week’s time I will be leading a session with trainee teachers introducing teacher subject knowledge and a knowledge rich curriculum. Reviewing my notes from a similar session last year, I thought it might be helpful in refreshing my thoughts to write a summary which has ended up as this series of posts. My aim has not been to say anything particularly new, but to write an accessible, but rigorous and useful, introduction to what is meant by a knowledge rich curriculum and teacher subject knowledge, why these are vital in effective planning and teaching, and how the latter might be developed. I’ve drawn extensively on the work of others, which I have sought to acknowledge throughout. I hope this might prove an interesting and useful read for new and more experienced teachers alike.

Curriculum design and teacher subject knowledge are arguably two of the most important aspects in ensuring students receive an excellent education. Curricular thinking and curriculum design can seem a bit abstract when battling with the day-to-day of planning and teaching. But really the curriculum should be at the heart of all we do in the classroom, and it’s important to link your planning and teaching of a particular lesson to the bigger curricular picture of your subject. Further, I hope to demonstrate that this is inextricably linked to teacher subject knowledge. This is a vast subject so I’m aiming for an overview to prompt thought, with lots of links to further reading for greater depth and detail.

I have broken this series into three posts:

1. What knowledge do teachers need?
2. The knowledge rich curriculum
3. Developing and deploying subject knowledge

Part 1: What knowledge do teachers need?

Levels of knowledge

Here, I draw heavily on the work of Efrat Furst and I would strongly recommend taking some time to look at her website. Efrat pictures knowledge as triangles which build to make pyramids. She divides people into four categories – novice, advanced, expert and teacher.

Novice: Each triangle represents a new piece (element) of knowledge – a fact/concept/idea. Novices have some of this knowledge, but the links between them are weak, they have not been consolidated into a secure knowledge schema yet. 

Advanced: As new knowledge is used and links are made, the small chunks become consolidated and links can be made to more and more pieces of knowledge which can then serve as the foundation for new learning.

Expert: More and more layers of consolidated knowledge build up until the expert has a complex and organised knowledge structure and can easily use and draw upon the well consolidated concepts. However, the expert may well become blind to the individual elements of knowledge which build up these concepts – the links between them and the steps in learning which are hard to grasp, for example.

Teacher: A teacher is an expert who has regained sight of these elements of knowledge and is thus able to go back and make these knowable to their students. This understanding of how the knowledge builds, the things students will struggle with, why they’re hard, what misconceptions are likely to need unpicking etc. is what I mean by teacher subject knowledge, it’s more than just knowing, or even being an expert in your subject. The term usually used to describe this knowledge is Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK).

An Example: Maths – multiplication requires knowledge of number and place. A lot of people are experts at multiplication and can multiply quite complex numbers successfully and automatically. A Maths teacher is additionally aware of the thought processes involved in this and can break down the process into steps and knows how best to build up this knowledge and introduce their students to the necessary elements in the correct order for them to become successful at multiplication.

I find Efrat’s pyramid graphic really helpful in thinking about the two areas of curriculum and teacher subject knowledge and how they relate to one another. 

Your students are somewhere on the journey you have already taken, from novice to expert. The detail of the knowledge which students must acquire to move towards a more expert understanding of the subject is what is set out in a knowledge rich curriculum. As a teacher, you are somewhere on the journey from expert to teacher, even the most experienced teachers are always learning. The knowledge which you need to move from being an expert in your subject to a highly effective teacher, is the teacher subject knowledge, or PCK. Knowledge of the curriculum and PCK are both vital in planning and teaching effective lessons (see Part 3). 

Part 2 of this series explores the knowledge rich curriculum and why it is important (I’ve written this series as an introductory overview, so if you’re familiar with this, skip straight to Part 3).

Part 3 of this series looks at the importance of knowledge of the curriculum and PCK in planning and teaching, and how these can be developed.

Links

Efrat Furst’s site which explores the ‘levels of knowledge’ and how they relate to cognitive science in much more depth: https://sites.google.com/view/efratfurst/home?authuser=0