Knowing your subject: The role of disciplinary knowledge in effective teaching

Changing perspectives When I began teaching, back in 2003, I was frequently told that I was a teacher first and subject specialist second. There was a prevalent idea that we should be teaching generic transferable skills, such as evaluation or interpretation, and that our subjects were just a vehicle through which this was delivered. This was reflected in a national curriculum that was light on specific content and remote from developments at the ‘frontiers of the subject’ ((Marsden, 1997), p. 241). (For more on the place of facts, knowledge and skills within the curriculum, see (Christodoulou, 2014)). More recently, however, there has been a growing recognition that a teacher’s subject knowledge is vitally important. In a review of research behind effective teaching, Coe et al. ((Coe et al., 2014), p. 2) found that a teacher’s subject knowledge, and their understanding of how pupils handle this subject, has strong evidence of impact on student outcomes. We can see this