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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 1: Second half-term: the importance of subject and curriculum knowledge

    • Video introduction

    Instructions

    Watch the video. The video outlines what you will cover in this Block.

    Video transcript

    A school’s curriculum sets out its vision for the knowledge, skills and values that its pupils will learn. In most schools the curriculum is made up of discrete subjects, such as maths, or groupings of subjects, such as humanities. You might already feel confident in one or more subject or curriculum areas having studied it at university. Many people become teachers because of a passion for a subject and – if you ask them – will try to make the case for why their preferred subject is the most important in the curriculum! Of course, depending on the phase or department in which you teach you may well be teaching multiple subjects.

    In recent years, there has been an increasing appreciation that a teacher’s _subject knowledge_is critical. There is acceptance in the literature that secure subject knowledge is a defining characteristic of effective teaching.

    The in-depth, advanced subject knowledge you may have developed through university study will need to evolve further in order to make this knowledge accessible to the pupils you teach. Learning to do this will help you motivate your pupils and teach more effectively, leading to improved pupil outcomes. If you are teaching a subject or subjects which you feel less confident with, it is even more important to spend the time developing your subject and curriculum knowledge.

    • Secure subject knowledge will allow you to better sequence lessons and episodes of learning as you have a more sophisticated understanding of the small steps it takes to master the particular content you are trying to teach.
    • Secure subject knowledge will allow you to anticipate common misconceptions and to plan intentionally for these.
    • We know that pupils’ motivation is derived from their feelings of success ‒ the better they are taught, the more likely they are to be successful and therefore motivated. To be effective in teaching any subject you will need to be explicit in teaching pupils the knowledge and skills they need to be successful. You will need to have a particularly strong understanding of the essential concepts within the subject or subjects you teach in order to ensure that pupils have a secure foundation from which to begin to think critically about the subject.

    Experienced and effective teachers have a strong repertoire of examples to explain these key ideas – we know that pupils learn better when abstract concepts are illustrated with multiple, concrete examples. You will also start to see how generic pedagogical strategies can best be applied within each subject: tools like questioning can only be truly effective if the question is devised from a place of secure knowledge.

    Dedicating time to developing your subject and curriculum knowledge can also be hard to do among the myriad of competing priorities that you face in school, especially at the beginning of your career. It can feel more important to deal with immediate concerns, such as planning your next lesson or dealing with a behaviour incident, instead of setting aside time to enhance your understanding of the subject and curriculum. This Block will show you the importance of making time to prioritise this aspect of your practice.

    This Block will also support you to develop your understanding of the importance of literacy and build a collection of teaching skills related to it. Improvements in literacy skills support pupils to access the curriculum across all subject areas, not just English or Humanities; and good literacy develops throughout pupils’ school careers, not just in early primary. Every teacher must take responsibility for improving pupils’ literacy skills in their subject area.

    Block 4 has been designed with all of this in mind and seeks to support you with practical strategies to develop your subject and curriculum knowledge, encouraging you to seek out the support and expertise of more experienced colleagues to do so. It builds on everything you have learned so far about classroom practice, how pupils learn and adaptive teaching.