{"id":4878,"date":"2018-02-01T05:50:54","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T12:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/?p=4878"},"modified":"2018-02-01T05:50:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T12:50:54","slug":"a-fine-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/2018\/02\/01\/a-fine-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"A fine balance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">As a teacher who was trained first in a faculty of education and then went back to school for degrees in French and English I found this week&#8217;s reading interesting. In Alberta and Saskatchewan at least, elementary generalists are trained to know a little bit about everything and an undergrad degree in education contains one class in each of the content areas plus many courses in pedagogy. Moving into the classroom, however, teachers realize they need to not only know how to teach (PK) but also what to teach (CK). I have been in the classroom long enough to see a pendulum swing from phonics instruction to whole language to phonics instruction and I see that many teachers are missing an understanding of phonics and how language is structured and are not able to include that in their teaching. As such, professional development opportunities become essential. In my division in the past couple of years there has been a fund developed to send school teachers back to university for maths courses (once I\u2019m done my masters I\u2019m definitely planning on taking advantage of this). As Shulman argues, there is definitely a balance for classroom teachers between all of the elements of TPCK and I think an effective teacher must be a master of not only the content (many is the university prof who knows their content inside out and backwards but is unable to teach it) but also the pedagogy and how technology augments the learning. As an elementary teacher, I see the math and science we do as being foundational and this is where a teacher with a tenuous hold on math concepts can still teach the math but may inadvertently introduce misconceptions to students that have to be corrected later in their learning journey. Something as innocuous as using \u201cmakes\u201d instead of \u201cequals\u201d (ie. 3+7 makes 10 instead of 3+7 equals 10) makes it difficult for a learner to make sense of algebra later when the equal sign does not always appear at the end of a question. For this reason, I think it\u2019s a good thing that many universities are moving to an education degree that begins with a bachelors in a content area followed by a 1-2 year education after degree. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Shulman, L.S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4 -14<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a teacher who was trained first in a faculty of education and then went back to school for degrees in French and English I found this week&#8217;s reading interesting. In Alberta and Saskatchewan at least, elementary generalists are trained to know a little bit about everything and an undergrad degree in education contains one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43597,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1669398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b-pck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43597"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4879,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4878\/revisions\/4879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/stem2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}