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Issues about individual subject knowledge: summary
We observed several episodes in which individual teachers did not seem to understand the mathematics very well. The way this was handled varied:
- One teacher announced that he had just taught a terrible lesson because he hadn't understood what he was teaching.
- every teacher at a meeting admitted that they had no idea what a hectare looked like, even though they taught about them! Everyone laughed and began to share what knowledge they had and vowed to go away and 'google' it.
- in three incidents where teachers expressed mathematical ideas which were wrong or very limited, no one said or did anything to open the matter for discussion
- in another incident in which a teacher showed a flawed understanding of proportion, another teacher asked how she thought her students would perceive what she had been saying. This move opened the matter for discussion.
Given that these departments had built up an unusually high level of collegiality and shared purpose, and that we knew there were individual subject knowledge issues within some of the teams, it was an important finding that not all teachers had shifted into practices where insecurity or differing understandings could be discussed openly, rather they emerged incidentally in discussions about tasks and sometimes were not pursued.
