4. Content Knowledge
“The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content.”
Standard Components
Key Understandings
Content knowledge is easy to access in today's world, but being able to apply that knowledge and use it in constructive ways means building a solid base that you can mentally navigate with ease. Recall practice, universal design and looking to the standards are all ways I embed the key understandings that underpin any content I am teaching.
Tools of Inquiry
Along with helping to master the core components of a subject, I guide students through developing a toolkit for future learning. I aim to equip my students with the skills, methods and means to access, interpret and apply new knowledge - while also discerning between the various sources of information they encounter.
Beginner's Mind
For my practice, both as a teacher and as a student in life, I strive to maintain a beginner's mind. The belief that we have so much still to learn allows me to model learning to my students. I don't strive to be an expert, but an example of how to figure stuff out and ways to look at and approach problems.
meeting the standard
When it was originally suggested that I go for a Social Studies endorsement based on my undergraduate degree, I had to hold back a bit of a laugh. While I do have a degree in Community, Environment & Planning I would never have considered myself a history buff and struggle immensely with remembering dates, names and basically any specific piece of information.
I am however a world-class student, so I crammed and passed the test. When I got placed teaching two different history classes though, I started to get a bit nervous. It was one thing to answer some multiple-choice questions and quite another to act as an authority on a subject. Back to the books I went.
It wasn’t until school began my student-teaching quarter that I finally learned what it was I would be teaching in the first place. So it became common practice for me to maintain a safe lead on my students, learning the material so that I could turn around and teach it. While time consuming and an added stress, it pushed me to acknowledge all of the connections I could make, that my students didn’t have the experience to share. I was able to better see how they could take things in, and had a recent memory of helpful adages, insights and mnemonic devies.
I mastered the content myself, in tandem with the planning of how to teach it. This proved to be both effective and limiting, but has given me a solid base to stand on and teach from in the future.
