Subject Focus

In generating our subject focussed resources, we raised many questions, particularly in relation to whose knowledge and what knowledge? These are complex and multi-layered dilemmas, and so we cannot offer you neat answers, but we can share some of our dialogues. This approach is in keeping with our co-analytical ethos, and consistent with our educative mentoring  values shared on our General Mentor Essentials page.

A key question is concerned with whose knowledge matters in our subject knowledge development? The pupils? The teacher’s? The mentor’s?  Society’s? Of course its all of these, but significantly they are all different. It is therefore important that the significances of these differences are appreciated. What a teacher needs to know is not the same as a pupil. It is not sufficient to be ‘one page ahead’ of the pupils. Teachers, of course need to appreciate the content knowledge that they teach, but they also need to  be concerned with the way that a subject organises and specialises its knowledge. Sometimes this is known as substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Substantive knowledge is a term often used to refer to  content knowledge and disciplinary knowledge to the ways of knowing in a subject. However these terms, like many in education are used variously. What is important is that general mentors and trainees ponder these questions together so that informed choices are made. In the resources section there are links to the particular Ofsted research review for each subject. You may find it useful to consider how the term’s substantive and disciplinary have been used in these, as well as considering the aims of the subject have been expressed.

When considering the subject’s aims, you will begin to engage with the subject’s key concepts, these ideas that are central to a discipline. They are enduring rather than fixed;  debatable rather than completely secure. Each subject is made up of an ecology of connected concepts – there will be some disagreement within subject communities as to the exact combination, but there will inevitably be some commonality. It is the collection of concepts that makes a subject unique. These connected concepts can be used to organise and specialise the elements of content that pupils engage with. Often trainee teachers focus on atomised content, rather than being supported in recognising how elements and experiences relate to the subject’s concepts. In the resources section that follows we have tried to use each subject’s concepts to help frame some questions that can be used to inform subject focused co-analysis in ITTE.  We hope that by using specialising concepts in relation to specific content, coherent sequencing can be enabled for both the trainee, and pupils alike.