Powerful knowledge.

After taking a little detour last week, we resume our work this week considering why oracy interventions might fail. If you haven’t already, it would be good to check out the newsletter from a couple of weeks ago in which we considered the role that teacher beliefs play in the process of long term change in the classroom.

A reminder too that, whilst a lot of what we look at is specific to the process of embedding oracy, actually, the processes we consider can be applied to any change management process and are an essential part of strategic planning.

Teacher knowledge: what does the research tell us?

All teachers enter the profession with a degree of expertise in the subject areas in which they will be teaching. Of course, this knowledge might not be consistent: mathematicians, for example, might be more comfortable with statistics than mechanics; historians might define themselves as modern or early-modern scholars. However, in general terms, the subject matter knowledge of teachers is secure and developed enough for them to feel confident in the material that they are required to teach when using explicit or direct instruction methods.

In the 1980s, Lee Shulman introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge. In simple terms, this is the knowledge that a teacher might have about how to break a subject down and make it manageable for novice learners. For example, secure subject matter knowledge in English means that a teacher is clear about a grammatically secure sentence; secure pedagogical content knowledge means that the teacher knows how to sequence the teaching of nouns, verbs, clauses and so forth in order to help novice learners understand why sentences are grammatically accurate.

Much initial teacher training focuses on the development of pedagogical content knowledge and we see rapid improvements in this in beginning teachers. This idea also helps to explain why being brilliant in your subject doesn’t necessarily mean you are brilliant at teaching your subject (does anyone else remember Jamie Oliver’s doomed attempt to create his Dream School by simply choosing really clever people and expecting them to be able to teach really well? It makes for compelling viewing….).

It’s worth introducing too the idea that oracy itself should be considered a subject. Just like the examples given above, if a teacher is to develop oracy skills in young people, they need secure subject matter knowledge of what good oracy skills look like, as well as secure pedagogical content knowledge regarding the best mechanisms for developing these skills in young people.

Why does this matter?

There are quite a few things that come out of this research that we will consider over the next few weeks.

The first of these is the influence that teacher knowledge has over questioning in the classroom. We start with questioning because it is a high impact intervention in both subject terms but also in terms of the development of oracy - it’s a really good thing.

Questions asked in the classroom broadly fall in to two categories: knowledge questions, which are closed and aim to assess what students already know; comprehension questions, which are open-ended, designed to extend ideas and promote dialogue. Overwhelmingly, teachers ask knowledge questions, which are effective ways of assessing understanding. The major barrier to teachers asking comprehension questions is a lack of contingency knowledge: by opening interactions up to broader concepts that are perhaps more discursive, a teacher is less in control of what is being covered. This means that both their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge might be stretched or even tested: it feels much safer, then, for teachers to ask knowledge questions and to remain ‘in control’ of the classroom dialogue.

There are two strategies that can be implemented to overcome this: the first is to do with wait time, which is a development of pedagogical content knowledge. The second pertains to the development of subject matter knowledge: we will cover the implementation of both of these over the next two weeks.

Further reading

Lee, E Experienced Secondary Teachers’ Representations of Pedagogical Content Knowledge - (2008)