Development of teachers’ knowledge: the breadth, depth, and detail

In his seminal work of 1986, Lee Shulman articulated what teachers should ‘know, do, understand, or profess’ (p4), which, in the rhetoric of educational reformers on the subject of the knowledge base of teaching, was something previously assumed and unexpressed. Shulman asked, ‘what are the sources for the knowledge base of teaching? In what terms can these sources be conceptualised? What are the processes of pedagogic reasoning and action? What are the implications for teaching policy and educational reform?’ He argued that teaching requires knowledge of the topics regularly occurring in subject curricula (content), knowledge of forms of representation of those ideas (pedagogy), knowledge of learners’ understanding of those topics, and that the combination of these is a form of knowledge unique to teachers: pedagogic content knowledge (PCK). In Shulman’s (1987) words, PCK is ‘the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organised, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners and presented for instruction’ (p8).

The generation of PCK requires a process of transformation of that knowledge, in which a teacher will prepare (plan and apply critical scrutiny to the choice of resources), represent (consider the key ideas and they might be represented, in the form of examples, analogies, etc.), select (decide on the strategies for teaching the lesson) and differentiate (adapt and tailor the input to learners’ characteristics, context, and capabilities; la Velle and Newman 2021 p41). This theoretical framing has, over the last four decades, given rise to a debate in the academic field of teacher education that has refined and nuanced the concept of PCK (see, for example, Andrews 2001; Magnusson, Krajcik, and Borko 1999; Tamir 1988).

One important emergent idea has been that of subject specific PCK, which has been argued to be linked to distinctive subject subcultures (Baggott la Velle et al. 2004). In mathematics, for example, Marks (1990) specified four components of PCK, adding to those of Shulman, media for subject instruction, including topic organisation, activities, and problems, effects of materials on learners, pairing of resources to the content and the learners. The first two papers in this issue of JET echo this early work on the diversification of PCK in the context of mathematics education. The first is from Mesture Kayhan Altay and Elif Yetkin Özdemir from Hacettepe University in Turkey, who investigated the ways in which student teachers connected mathematical concepts with museum artefacts when planning lessons. Predictably, given their inexperience, the student teachers struggled to make connections with the more abstract mathematical concepts potentially afforded by the museum exhibits, although they readily appreciated the value of the resources for enhancing mathematics lessons. The second paper, by Shirley Tan and colleagues from Nagoya University in Japan and Lausanne University of Teacher Education in Switzerland, focusses on the use of ‘bansho’, a pedagogic strategy used in Japan for mathematics teaching. The word bansho means ‘board writing’ and the teacher uses the board to record the flow of the entire lesson, so that learners can see the connections and progression of the various ideas being taught and their illustrative examples, to organise their thinking and to develop new ideas. This paper emphasises the value of bansho for making multiple representations, which clearly resonates with Shulman’s assertion of representation as a key component of the transformation of teachers’ knowledge into a learnable form.

The next two articles take a broader view of how teachers increase and deepen their knowledge within their subject disciplines. Lauren Capotosto and Kristina Reardon, from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, USA, looked at how student teachers understood the concept of disciplinary literacy, a competence that enables learners to read, write, speak about, listen to, and think conceptually and critically as experts in a specific subject. An important finding of this research into substantive and syntactic content knowledge for teaching was that the student teachers saw the literacy skills and practices across a range of disciplines as discrete, and that they had acquired these by inference. The second article to address the matter of PCK within academic disciplines is by Merce Garcia-Mila and colleagues from the University of Barcelona in Spain and San José State University in California, USA. They investigated student teachers’ views about the explicit teaching of the skill of argumentation within subject disciplines. Findings were that whilst the student teachers recognised the value of the idea of learning to argue and arguing to learn, they were less enthusiastic about using lesson time to practice it. Interestingly, there was no great divergence of opinions across the academic disciplines. Enculturation into an academic subject discipline starts at an early educational stage and it is only when someone begins to think about the teachability of a subject that disciplinary norms and values are viewed through a critical lens. Shulman’s belief that the substantive and syntactic components of a subject discipline (at least those that appear regularly in school curricula) were the starting and finishing point of the pedagogic cycle: that by teaching about something one learns more about it. This has been argued to be the upward spiral of teacher learning, i.e. with each turn of the pedagogic cycle, the teacher arrives at an enhanced level of comprehension (la Velle and Newman 2021, 41).

One important spin-off from Shulman’s PCK paradigm arose from the increasing use of information and communications technologies in the classroom from the 1990s (see, e.g. Baggott la Velle, Watson, and Nichol 2000; Baggott and Wright 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997). Mishra and Koehler (2006) formulated the TPACK model (technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) to describe the kinds of knowledge needed for successful integration of technology into teaching and learning. There is much evidence to suggest that computer-based simulations can enhance initial teacher education, particularly in controversial or confidential situations (see, e.g. McGarr 2020). The next paper, by Jesús Paz-Albo and colleagues from the University of King Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, and the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood Development, Chicago, USA, describes a study into the use of a simulation of parent, family, and community engagement in education. Student teachers from Spain and the USA engaged with the simulation and completed an online survey. In both national contexts, the student teachers showed increased understanding of ways of promoting family engagement and enhanced knowledge of teachers’ strategies of fostering positive relationships with families. Both these articles illustrate the refined form of teacher knowledge that is represented in the overlap of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge that is TPACK.

The notion of teacher-as-researcher, both producer and consumer, is a foundation of all the highest quality teacher education programmes (la Velle and Flores 2018; la Velle and Kendall 2019). The next paper is by Anna Isabel Schröder and colleagues from the University of Cologne in Germany and presents a study that exemplifies a combination of e-learning methods that elevates the approach above traditional instructional methods. This article argues that whilst inculcating research knowledge and skills into student teachers during the intensity of their university-based course is problematic, their novel interactive-learning module is most effective in combination with online instruction for promoting student teachers’ research knowledge and superior to online delivery of a traditional research methods module alone.

As has been reported in two special issues of JET (Vol 46 No 4 and Vol 48 No 4), the impact on teacher education of the lockdown of schools and universities consequent upon the COVID-19 pandemic has been significant in terms of the use of technologies in emergency remote teaching. The next article, by Elizabeth Rushton and her colleagues from King’s College, University of London, UK, and seven other English universities, identified the nature of school practicum visits and the role of technology and digital pedagogies as key areas of change in the context of postgraduate student teachers’ classroom readiness at the end of their one-year initial teacher education programme. They argue that collaborative professional communities of practice are essential for empowering student teachers to become ‘adaptable, pastorally engaged subject specialists’.

The importance of communities of practice for informal teacher learning is the focus of the next article, from Xianhan Huang and colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, China. They looked at the association between informal learning and the development of teacher self-efficacy, contrasting this relationship between public (state funded) and private (fee-paying) schools in China. The authors present a taxonomy of informal teacher learning and show that whilst all teachers in their survey emphasised the importance for their self-efficacy of interaction with stakeholders (e.g. parents, pupils, and peers) for professional learning, the private school teachers also valued interaction with multimedia for informal learning. This suggests that where provision of technology is elevated, its affordances are effective for teacher learning.

The importance of professional communities of practice is again highlighted in the next paper, from Fatma Gümüşok (Bartin University, Turkey) and Gölge Seferoğlu (School of Education at California State University, USA). They investigated the formation of professional identity during the transition from in-service teacher to teacher educator. This is an under-researched area, but one that will be familiar to many, if not most, university-based teacher educators. As is argued and evidenced in the Turkish national context, this article highlights the importance of professional collaboration during this adaptive enculturation into higher education, with all its opportunities and tensions (Clapham et al. 2023).

To adapt is to survive. The next paper, by Benjamin Dreer from the University of Erfurt in Germany, focusses on the learning changes needed by student teachers during practicum. All schools are different, so adaptation to the environment in which they find themselves is always the challenge for student teachers. Skilful selection of placements is the work of the teacher educator, but ‘job crafting’ (i.e. how they actively use opportunities to fit in and thrive by best use of their strengths and skills) is the work of the student teacher on placement. This article shows that for the strongest student teachers, job crafting was not only related to the success of their placement but also predicted job satisfaction, engagement, and learning gain.

An area of research in teacher education that is gaining increasing interest is that of disability studies. The next paper in this issue has this focus, also in the context of student teachers during practicum. Nicole Hansen from Fairleigh Dickinson University and her colleagues from two other universities in the USA included in their teacher education programmes an element of disability studies designed to raise student teachers’ awareness of the importance of acceptance of human differences and their confidence to be open in the classroom about disabilities. Knowledge of learners, in all their diversity, is a foundational plank of Shulman’s PCK model, and an understanding of the lived experience of disabled pupils in a mainstream classroom is an important nuance of this.

The final article in this issue returns to a familiar theme in JET: that of retention of teachers. Yuanfang Guo and Xiaowei Li of Beijing Normal University, China, looked at the relationship in Chinese preschool teachers between work-family conflict, commitment to their institution, and their decision to stay or leave. They found that for both experienced and beginning preschool teachers, institutional commitment was the mediating factor in balancing their work/family life with their decision to carry on or not and that this became stronger with longer service. The global figures for qualified teachers leaving the profession are frightening. For example, in England, nearly 40,000 teachers, representing 8.8% of the workforce left teaching in the 2021–22 academic year, an increase from 6.9% in the previous year (Schools Week 2023). Several studies have shown the link between teachers’ knowledge and teacher retention. Factors include the quality of CPD (Gaikhorst et al. 2015); job satisfaction (Bozeman et al. 2013; De Stercke, Goyette, and Robertson 2015); quality of mentorship (Whalen, Majocha, and Van Nuland 2019); self-efficacy and confidence (Hughes 2012) and communities of practice (Waters 2019).

This issue concludes with a short Research-in-Progress paper by Zhaoxuan Wang and colleagues, who report on the importance to student teachers of coherence in their teacher education curriculum.

Research evidence that teachers’ knowledge of their pupils, their subjects and how to teach them continues to develop in breadth, depth, and detail, which has been well documented through the pages of JET. Despite this burgeoning of research evidence and knowledge, the question posed by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle seems as relevant today as it was in (1999): is to know more to teach better? Concepts of teacher learning and knowledge have led to a plethora of different ideas about how to improve teacher education, both initial and continuing, as well as curriculum and school development. In his review of the conceptions of knowledge in research of teaching, Gary Fenstermacher (1994) concluded that PCK has both formal and practical elements. Robert V Bullough Jr, an esteemed member of JET’s international editorial board, responded to this and to the issue of the place of PCK in teacher education with the words, ‘Having both practical and formal knowledge elements is a source of much mischief and confusion’ Bullough (2001). The debate continues with JET as its mouthpiece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).