What is Pedagogical Content Knowledge?

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) is our professional knowledge. All of the planning, and perhaps, all of our teaching decisions  are made based upon our Pedagogical Content Knowledge . PCK is what we know about how learning happens, how our subjects are learned and what we know about the learners in front of us. It is practical knowledge.

It is not merely subject knowledge. It is how we transform the subject knowledge into multiple ways of representing it in teachable ways. It is how we take the implicit expert thinking of a subject specialist and make it explicit through modelling. It is how we find out student prior conceptions and tailor their experiences in order to learn, and potentially reorganise their understanding when their preconceptions turn out to be misconceptions. Knowing how to do this is PCK. Clearly PCK’s role in planning is central, to access it we have to stop and think and reflect on what students tend to already know, what students find difficult, what has helped in the past, what are the parts that make up the whole knowledge, what sequence should the concepts be taught in. To access this knowledge may require some research and discussions with other subject specialists. It takes time, but as a consequence our PCK grows to be rich and deep.

PCK was developed by Lee Shulman in 1986 and is a blend of our subject knowledge, our pedagogical knowledge and our knowledge of the context in which learning is taking place.We can also add to this our knowledge of the (ever changing) curriculum and the assessment of the subject.It is all of these things and more; describing it as a ‘blend’ does not really do it sufficient justice.

The great potential for formalising our use of pedagogical content knowledge is that we can move from using it instinctively and inconsistently to being able to plan with it systematically. Perhaps most importantly, it helps us to become more aware of what learning might look like in the classroom: sensitising us to misconceptions when they arise and turning them into teachable moments.

PCK most commonly manifests as one of four interacting forms:

1.    Knowing how to represent knowledge so that it can be learned. The content being taught determines our choices although there is a need for us to have multiple representations at our disposal to ensure we can be flexible and responsive to student needs.This is context dependent, with the teachers’ prior understanding of their class(es) being a key part of how we go about representing this knowledge.

2.    Knowing how to organise or sequence knowledge so that it can be learned. Here, we have to see how the knowledge is connected to other knowledge, other concepts. This involves both the macro and the micro: the connection to the overarching idea and the interrelatedness of underlying details.

3.    Knowing which concepts and ideas are difficult to learn and, subsequently, how to help students learn them. This includes knowledge of likely student misconceptions.

4.    Knowing which knowledge is important. This includes threshold concepts.

It is our pedagogical content knowledge that differentiates us, as teachers, from our equivalent non-teaching specialists (scientists, writers, mathematicians, economists); it is our pedagogical content knowledge that compels us to organise the transmission of knowledge in the way that we do. It is our own pedagogical content knowledge that we must employ in our planning, and it is the lens through which we must view students’  knowledge in lessons, so that we can respond, astutely improvise and ultimately help them learn.