In reading Schulman (and reviewing Mishra) I was caught by the complete untenability of our current system for assigning teachers. To simply meet the goals of PCK, we require teachers to have significant subject matter competence, pedagogical skills, combine these into specific tools and approaches for each concept within curriculum, and then adapt it all to a body of students that changes by the year or even by the term.<\/p>\n
Consider from here that a teacher may be placed in a science 4 classroom one year and a science 8 classroom the next. Not only have the students changed, but the subject matter may be vastly different. Even this is nowhere near the common situation in primary grades where a teacher with Math training may be responsible for 4 or more subjects.<\/p>\n
Successful education at the PCK level seems to require a certain degree of thoughtful assignment and consistency of teacher placement that does not seem to exist in reality. While flexibility in placement may be of benefit to a teacher’s career, it is not in the best interest of students. I like to consider myself a pretty well versed generalist but I am a music teacher by training. I could probably teach most of my hardest concepts with little more than a stick (conducting baton) while the easiest concepts in my course might leave non-music teachers jibbering with terror. Conversely, I am assigned 1 grade 6 science class. I like science. I get science. I am not a trained science specialist. I’ve lost track of the number of hours spent consulting my google oracle for things that a true science teacher could explain after 3 days of sleep deprivation. Things that I thought I understood I clearly did not to the extent necessary to teach with the fluency I have in my area of specialty.<\/p>\n
When we add the desire to teach with the most appropriate technologies to a discipline or topic, the whole thing becomes ridiculous given the current system. It seems that educational institutions will have some hard decisions to make regarding how to balance administrative conveniences and necessities against the educational benefits of specialist teachers able to instruct using all facet of the TPACK and PCK models<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One example of PCK teaching in my own practice is a technique borrowed from an former English teacher of mine. The goal is to get students to write specific and clear instructions, something very useful in the procedure section of lab reports. We use the analogy to a recipe and have the students write out the steps to make an ice cream sunday. The English teacher actually made them but I just acted out the instructions. The job of the teacher is to take the instructions absolutely literally and look for any possible way to misunderstand them. “Put the sprinkles on”, guess I’m wearing sprinkles in my hair. “Peel the banana and add the ice cream”, little Johnny gets a banana peel ice cream sandwich. The whole thing is acted out in the most dramatic way possible. The humour of the lesson really helps to embed just how specific you have to need to be to make sure your directions are perfectly clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In reading Schulman (and reviewing Mishra) I was caught by the complete untenability of our current system for assigning teachers. To simply meet the goals of PCK, we require teachers to have significant subject matter competence, pedagogical skills, combine these into specific tools and approaches for each concept within curriculum, and then adapt it all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b-pck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1271,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}