A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHER
At 8:15 in the morning, students start trickling in the door of a fourth grade classroom and the teacher quietly checks in with each one. She says good morning and asks a question or two about how they are doing. When one student, Tony, comes stomping into the room, she pulls him aside to check in with him, and finds that he had a rough morning. He had a fight with his mom about whether or not he could go over to a friend’s house after school. The teacher lends a caring ear to his frustrations, and then asks what he can do to refocus for school. She knows that Tony has been having a hard time at home lately. His older brother has been in trouble with the law, and his single-mother has to work two jobs to make ends meet. The teacher knows that his angry outbursts, which have recently become more frequent. are his way of crying out for help and attention. She doesn’t want to reward his stomping angry behavior, but she realizes he also needs time to help him transition into the regular routines of the day. They decide that reading a book by himself in the book corner to start off the day will help Tony cool down and get ready before the class’ morning meeting. The other students smoothly move through the morning routine, reading the morning message, turning in homework from the night before, and starting work on their daily journal entries. Once a critical mass of students have arrived the teacher calls out “Ago.” The students respond with “Amee” and wherever they are in the room they stop and turn to look at the teacher. The teacher gives two quick directions to put away materials and join the group at the rug for morning meeting. Students begin putting away work, and make their way to the morning meeting rug. The student that came in frustrated puts away his book too, and makes his way a little easier to join the group at the rug. An impending disaster has been averted. The teacher has successfully used her knowledge of routines and of Tony to help all students transition successfully into the school day.
Later in the day, the teacher models a comprehension strategy while reading aloud to the students. She reads Chesapeake Bay Walk by David Owen Bell and gives examples of her own personal connections to the text that help her understand what she has read. After hearing about how good readers use this strategy of making connections to help them remember and understand what they have read, students are ready to practice the skill themselves during their own independent reading time. The teacher understands how important it is to give students a clear model of what she expects them to do. She also knows that just modeling it doesn’t transfer to them understanding it and using it. The students have to practice what they saw and heard modeled.
Then near the end of the day, the teacher leads the students in creating filter funnels with mixtures of sand, soil, leaves, and rocks to get a better understanding how the materials on the ground help filter water. She has the students take old two-liter bottles with the bottoms cut out to create a funnel, place a coffee filter at the bottom of the neck, and fill the remaining bottle with sand, rocks, leaves, or soil. Then while holding the funnel over an empty tub the students pour a mixture of dirty water into the funnel. Some funnels filter out all of the dirt. Others leave a mixture of dirt in the water. This one experiment leads the class to a greater understanding of how rainwater is filtered in our soil, and leads to a discussion of acid rain and dirt run-off, pollution problems faced by the Chesapeake Bay, and what the students can do to help alleviate these problems. Tony, who came in frustrated in the morning, is with the group engaged in the discussion of how soil acts as a filter for some of the things that might otherwise end up in the bay. The teacher facilitates the discussion giving students guidance when their thinking is confused or they ask for clarification on a point. For the most part though, she allows the discussion to evolve naturally. She understands the concepts that she wants them to get about filtration, but she wants them to make their own steps to deepening their understanding. This requires that the teacher understands the concepts well enough to know when to step in and when to allow the students to control the discussion.
What I have just described are fictional accounts of typical scenes from a fourth grade classroom at an elementary school based on the reality of our classrooms at Two Rivers, but it could easily be any other real school. What is important in these snapshots is that they each illustrate a different aspect of what great teachers know and what they do with that knowledge. As I have worked in education for the last thirteen years, I have grown a greater appreciation for that vast amount of knowledge that we as teachers have to bring with them into the classroom everyday to accomplish the task of educating our children. It has become apparent to me that we need a way of describing that knowledge so that we can make informed decisions about our practice.
Three broad areas of knowledge cover the basic body of understanding that applies to teachers in any field. First is what I call curricular knowledge. This can be loosely defined as what we teach. The second is what I call pedagogical knowledge, or how we teach. Last is what I call social knowledge, which focuses on our understanding of who we teach. Each of these categories of knowledge encompass vast amounts of understanding that no single teacher will ever be able to completely master within the scope of his or her career. However, being able to categorize what we already know about curriculum, pedagogy, and our students; and what we need to know about these things allows us to target our learning as professionals in education. With this in mind I think it is important to expand on each of these categories of knowledge to develop a better understanding of where we fit within a continuum of learning about what teachers need to know.
CURRICULAR KNOWLEDGE
I begin with curricular knowledge because this is where we began explicitly to develop our formal knowledge as learners. When we first walked into an educational setting as students at whatever age we began formal schooling, we may not have been clearly taught about how things were going to be presented to us or about who we were sitting beside in class, but we were all told in some fashion what we were learning. We may not have had lessons on the vocabulary that teachers use in professional discussions about reading, but we knew we were working on reading and phonics, or that we were dissecting a frog to look at its anatomy. All students begin school learning something about curricular knowledge.
Then as we enter schools again for the first time as educators, curricular knowledge is usually outlined explicitly for us in the form of standards or a scope and sequence. These documents provide a road map of the curricular knowledge that we are obliged to impart to students. We are told in general terms what we are to teach. Within these documents, curricular knowledge falls into typically two distinct types of knowledge, factual knowledge and procedural knowledge.
Factual knowledge is knowledge of subject matter. It is the understanding of the topics we cover and their relevant vocabulary. It includes most of our learning about history, geography, economics, culture, biology, geology, chemistry, physics, or whatever area of the math, social studies, or science we need to know. It is defined by all of the discrete facts that we learn. In the snapshots above, the teacher used her content knowledge during the class discussion about filters and her read aloud.
In contrast, procedural knowledge is the knowledge of processes or skills. These skills include the skills readers use to decode text fluently; strategies good readers use to comprehend; algorithms mathematicians use to solve computation problems; the steps in the writing process; the components of the scientific method; and the skills to paint a beautiful picture to name but a few. The teacher in the example above used this knowledge in modeling a reading comprehension strategy while reading aloud to her students
In addition to these two types of knowledge, in A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revison of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives Lorin W. Anderson, David R. Krathwohl, and a team of additonal editors outlined two other essential types of knowledge rarely captured in standards. The first, conceptual knowledge occasionally appears in standards, but is not recognized as such in too many classrooms and thus is taught like factual knowledge. The second, metacognitive knowledge, rarely if ever shows up in lists of standards.
Conceptual knowledge is the knowledge of the larger structures or frameworks that hold together the factual and procedural knowledge. Concepts are the way that we make sense or understand the factual knowledge and give meaning to learning individual facts or skills. Conceptual knowledge is developed through understanding a topic and how it can be organized in a coherent fashion. Thus conceptual knowledge requires that we be able to explain, interpret, and apply knowledge in a given domain to diverse situations and gives us the opportunity to solve novel tasks.
The fourth kind of knowledge outlined in A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing, metacognitive knowledge, is the general knowledge of cognition and how we think about our own cognition and problem solving. For people to become effective problem solvers, they need to have a degree of metacognitive ability so that they can evaluate and thus improve the ways they think through a problem.
Because we have been exposed to curricular knowledge from such an early age and we are given a broad outline of what students should know in the form of our standards, it comes as no surprise that we all have a basic of understanding of what I mean when I say curricular knowledge. What is surprising is how little time is spent in elementary schools developing teachers’ curricular knowledge, particularly in the area of conceptual and metacognitive knowledge. While there is frequently professional development time spent around developing teachers’ knowledge of reading, writing, and occasionally other processes, there is an assumption that we as teachers already know what we need to know about social studies and science to teach it effectively. However, as an outline, our standards do not represent the depth of knowledge that quality teachers must have to perform their job well. In addition, a degree in education from a college or university, does not necessarily translate into the breadth or depth of knowledge teachers need to have in specific subject areas.
PEDAGOGICAL KNOWLEDGE
The second area of knowledge that teachers have to develop is pedagogical knowledge. This is the knowledge that is most well cultivated at schools of education, and continues to be developed in our professional development throughout our careers. In addition, this is the knowledge that is most often debated in schools of education as they struggle with different models of delivering instruction. The teacher in my example above demonstrated her own pedagogical knowledge in each of the snapshots, but particularly as she modeled a skill during a read aloud and as she engaged kids in a hands-on experience with natural filters before having a discussion about these concepts.
I think of pedagogical knowledge as components of three separate areas, knowledge of structures, knowledge of delivery methods, and knowledge of assessment.
Knowledge of structures is a teacher’s understanding of the systems and routines that best enable students to maximize the time that they are learning and are engaged in the content and skills we want them to masters. Within this sub-area of pedagogical knowledge I include everything from a teacher’s understanding of pacing and the sequence he or she uses to introduce topics to how she or he structures the physical environment in his or her classroom to encourage students to engage in learning.
Building on how a teacher structures the learning environment, teachers also have to know how to facilitate experiences in a meaningful way in which all students learn. I call this knowledge of delivery methods, and it includes all of the strategies that a teacher might use to ensure every student develops mastery over the content and skills outlined in the scope and sequence. In my example classroom above, the teacher engaged her students by having them create filters to demonstrate the concept of water filtering through soil. This experience allowed students to construct understanding of filtration through first hand experience before applying their knowledge in a discussion. It demonstrates the teacher’s understanding of delivery methods in how best to engage her students.
As teachers teach they also have to have knowledge of assessment, so that they can best gauge what students have learned and what they still need to learn. A quality teacher understands how to use assessment not just to report student progress (an important part of a teacher’s use of assessment) but also to analyze the student’s progress by identifying strengths and areas that need greater reinforcement or remediation. A strong understanding in assessment is reflected by changes in practice to help all students master the learning targets set out by standards. These three areas of pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of structures, delivery methods, and assessment, make up most of what we do during the day. It makes sense that our professional development centers on this area of knowledge, but it is important to recognize that it is but one piece of what we have to know to complete our work well.
SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
The final area of knowledge that I laid out at the beginning of this piece is the first type of knowledge the teacher in my opening utilized as she checked in with students in the morning and as she helped the student Tony at the beginning of the day stay focused. Unfortunately this type of knowledge is too often ignored in professional development or dismissed by public education initiatives and yet it remains one of the largest areas of concern for teachers and families alike. This knowledge, which I’ve labeled social knowledge, is at the core of what we do because education is at its heart a social endeavor that strives to help all people successfully live in and contribute to our communities. This overarching social goal is the reason that we find sound pedagogical methods to deliver meaningful curricular knowledge to students. Without a knowledge of where our students are as learners, we will never be able to effectively utilize our curricular or pedagogical knowledge.
With this in mind, I divide social knowledge into four categories of knowledge: developmental knowledge, cultural knowledge, knowledge of social roles, and psychological / emotional knowledge.
Developmental knowledge is an understanding of where a student is in terms of their physical and cognitive development. This relates to their cognitive ability and their maturity as well as their age. Being able to understand where a student is developmentally allows teachers to understand where they are on the continuum of curricular knowledge that they must obtain and how to set realistic goals for helping them attain that knowledge.
Cultural knowledge is the knowledge that we need to understand the cultural norms of our students and how those norms affect how the students construct meaning and communicate. In our profession we communicate with hundreds of students and families over the course of our careers. It is naïve at best, and narrow minded prejudice at worst if we assume that all of these students and families should conform to the same cultural norms of communication and interaction that we use. Teachers consequently have to become aware of the cultures of the students and families that they serve in order to bridge gaps in communication.
Knowledge of social roles is the area of knowledge that focuses on our understanding of the roles that students play in a classroom or in a family and how those roles change from one setting to the next. For example, a student who may be a leader during reading may turn into a follower during math because this is a subject in which he or she struggles. Understanding these roles and how they impact learning for students and families alike, allows a teacher to help students negotiate what are often roadblocks to learning. This can occur in the common situation of a student’s learning surpassing the education of a parent or other primary caregiver.
Finally psychological / emotional knowledge is what we, as teachers, need to understand our students as individuals with unique moods, attitudes, worldviews, and identities. It is within this psychological / emotional knowledge that we come to understand who are students are and how their personality affects their construction of meaning. The teacher in the scenario above took all of this into consideration when meeting Tony at the door first thing in the morning and adapting his morning routine so that he could be successful.
ON BECOMING AN EXEMPLARY TEACHER
This outline of curricular knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and social knowledge only touches the broad areas of understanding an exemplary teacher brings to his or her classroom, and the reality is that for a teacher to remain a quality teacher, he or she must make a life-long commitment to developing his or her knowledge in each area. We have to face the fact that we will never have all of the knowledge we need. Instead we content ourselves to having a basic breadth of understanding within each area of knowledge and to obtaining greater depth of understanding in specific areas over time. The implications for schools and teachers are great.
As institutions of education, our schools need to commit to being authentic learning communities that view their employees as learners just as we view our students. Teachers must be respected for where they are on the continuum of learning about curriculum, pedagogy, and social knowledge.
At the same time, schools need to outline what the minimum expectations are for their teachers’ understanding of each area of knowledge. It is not fair to students, families, to a school community, or to teachers themselves to have a teacher in a classroom before that teacher has the knowledge they need to succeed. By explicitly expressing the minimum expectations, a school helps ensure that teachers are prepared before they take on the responsibilities of a classroom.
In addition, to help all teachers broaden and deepen their knowledge base, schools have to structure time during each week dedicated to developing teachers’ knowledge through professional development and independent reflection time. By intentionally building in and respecting this time for professional development and reflection, schools demonstrate their commitment to learning for their faculty.
However, it is not enough to set minimum expectations, set time aside, and leave it at that. Schools need to be invested in the long term learning of their teachers. By this token, once they have determined that their teachers have met minimum expectations, they need to assess actively their faculty’s understanding of curriculum, pedagogy, and social knowledge as demonstrated in their work. Then based on that assessment help teachers set learning targets that are clear and achievable within an academic year for each member of the staff, much as we do for our students. In this way, schools can help their teachers move from minimum levels of understanding to a greater depth of knowledge. By setting individual, specific, and achievable learning targets, teachers are able to exercise autonomy in their learning while at the same time broadening the overall knowledge base of the school.
The implication for teachers is that we need to take responsibility for our learning. This begins by accurately reflecting on and assessing our learning and being open to other’s assessment of that learning. By practicing regular reflection, we focus both on the broad areas of knowledge that we understand, and the specific points that we don’t. Through this reflection, we can set specific learning targets that help us prioritize our learning. Then we must seek out sources for expanding our knowledge whether it is through collaboration with a peer or mentor teacher, reading professional literature, formal professional development, or classes.
Being an active participant in a learning community requires the continuous process of becoming more aware. As I reflect on this, I am reminded of a scene form Christopher Paolini’s fantasy novel, Eldest. In the scene, his hero, Eragon, is sent to meditate in a clearing in the woods. He is told to open his mind and become aware of everything in his surroundings. By meditating silently with a little help from magic, he is able to see into the life of each of the things in the woods. However, he is not able to see into everything simultaneously. The first time he attempts to meditate he becomes intensely aware of a colony of ants and he spends his time focusing on those ants while ignoring the rest of the life around him. He goes out day after day and he focuses on a single aspect of the woods, the ant colony. At one point in the novel, it seems that Eragon will never be able to expand beyond his narrow focus on the ants. However, after many attempts, he gradually expands his awareness to include all life in the woods. This is a perfect metaphor for our work as educators in the complex woods that are our classrooms and schools. How often have we spent our time in a classroom focused on the ants while ignoring all of the other aspects of what is going on around us? The process of developing our knowledge and awareness of what is around us when we teach is not quick or easy. Becoming more aware is a life long endeavor. We would go a long way just in acknowledging and accepting this. My hope is that categorizing knowledge in the way that I have will help us to become more aware of what we know and what we need to learn. Then we will be better prepared to plan intentionally our path to becoming exemplary teachers.
