Subject Knowledge Essay

1898 Words8 Pages
Drawing on a range of perspectives, discuss the nature and importance of Subject Knowledge as it applies to teaching. Provide a rationale for any challenges that you may face in developing the appropriate subject knowledge to teach the Foundation Subjects at Key Stage 1. Identify and discuss the strategies, which you will use to overcome these, prior to your school experience. The role of the modern practitioner involves delivering knowledge to learners through diverse and inquisitive activities that, naturally, ensure progression. In order to achieve this, teachers of the 21st century can no longer rely heavily on textbooks or spoon-feeding pupils with facts and figures for memorisation. In this way, subject knowledge runs parallel to learning and teaching strategies, to create the backbone of the National Curriculum. ‘What’ you teach and ‘how’ you teach work in harmony to guarantee all pupils are flourishing to meet national targets. The following discussion explores the concept of subject knowledge further and the surrounding issues. It will also the discuss the problems and challenges that may arise when teaching the foundation subjects at key stage one level and how to overcome these barriers. Effective teaching of the curriculum involves meeting the needs of all learners and differing learning styles. John Wilson (2000) argues in his text ‘Key Issues in Education and Teaching’ that personal subject knowledge must be broad and in-depth in order for us to “cater for these different interests in different ways” (Wilson, 2000). He states that teachers are faced with the challenge of ensuring that they can visualise subjects from every angle of thought, in order to make them meaningful for all - “we have to make ‘subjects’ fit different interests” (Wilson, 2000). Practitioners cannot achieve this goal if their own subject knowledge is poor. For
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