What difference can a teacher make?

How did teachers make a difference in your life?

How Teaching Makes a Difference Teacher/student relationships: students who

have good relationships with their teachers in kindergarten do better all across their elementary experience.

Teacher preparation and quality: research demonstrates that high quality teachers help students to achieve.

Students who have a series of ineffective teachers will have poor achievement.

What is good teaching?If an interviewer were to ask you, what would you say?

Teacher expertise

Content knowledge—knowledge of the subject. General pedagogical knowledge (good teaching

strategies that apply to all subjects, classroom management, knowledge of settings such as grouping students).

Pedagogical content knowledge (curriculum, appropriate materials, special ways to teach the subject and its concepts)

Knowledge of learners and learning (characteristics and culture of learners, knowledge of development

Educational psychology: the discipline concerned with teaching and learning processes; applies the methods and theories of psychology and has its own, as well.

Knowledge of Content

Your knowledge of the subject matter(s) you teach: social studies, English literature, French, art, chemistry, mathematics, music, etc.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

An understanding of how to make a specific subject comprehensible to others.

This demonstration of a real world problem

followed by work with manipulatives will help

my students understand fractions.

Content knowledge: your knowledge of the subject matter.Pedagogical: knowledge about teaching.Therefore Pedagogical Content Knowledge is knowledge about how to teach concepts within a subject matter.

General Pedagogical Knowledge

An understanding of general principles of instruction and classroom management that transcends individual topics or subject matter areas.

Let’s see… For this next history lesson, how can I get them to understand the context of the

Revolutionary War? I think I’ll use constructivist techniques and have

students create a newspaper from that time. Hmmm…which students will

work best together in a group?

Instructional strategy

Classroom management

Certain instructional strategies and classroom management techniques can be used no matter what subject matter is being taught. This is GENERAL teaching or pedagogical knowledge.

Knowledge of Learners and Learning

Developmentally, my students need social contact because they are adolescents. I also know they need to construct knowledge; they don’t learn if

I just tell them something.

You need to know what is going on with your students in relation to several types of development (cognitive, psychosocial, linguistic, moral) and you need to know how the brain works in learning.

Can you differentiate between the four types of knowledge teachers use? Knowledge of content—subject matter

knowledge Pedagogical content knowledge—how to

teach that particular subject matter General pedagogical knowledge—general

knowledge about classroom management and instructional strategies

Knowledge of learners and learning—knowledge about students and how their brains work.