Essential Teacher Knowledge

What you do need to know in order to be able to teach? The question has long preoccupied teacher educators, since, apart from anything else, the way we answer it impacts on the design of training programmes and their related materials. Do teachers need to know a lot about grammar, for example? Second language acquisition (SLA)? Educational theory? Curriculum design? Developmental psychology? And so on. Those who study these things have hypothesized a number of different kinds of knowledge that appear to be implicated in teachers’ decision-making, including subject matter knowledge, general pedagogic knowledge (such as classroom management skills), and contextual knowledge, such as knowledge of the curriculum, of the students, of their social context, and so on. At the same time, this slicing up of the pie should not obscure the fact that, in the actual business of teaching, these knowledge bases are deployed simultaneously and interdependently, and constitute ‘an integrated and coherent whole’ (Tsui 2003: 59). ‘It is the melding of these knowledge domains that is at the heart of teaching’ (op. cit.: 58).