Guy Brandenburg has written extensively about public schooling, math teaching, and related topics. He is a retired math teacher from the District of Columbia public schools (1978-2009) and former teacher at ‘First Light’ Saturday Sciences School in D.C. at the Carnegie Academy for Science Education between 2006-2017.
I particularly liked his take on the importance of teachers knowing content as a necessary but not sufficient characteristic in becoming a “good” teacher.
How Much Does Knowledge Matter For Teaching
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran an editorial that was picked up and run in my region, raising a question about the “most important component of teaching.”
The actual issue was the substitute shortage (which I can report, via the experiences of the Board of Directors [of my school district] ) is severe–they have never had a sub when their kindergarten teacher is absent, [and the children] are just shunted into the other K teachers). Ohio has shifted to their own version of a warm body substitute law; in Ohio, if you have a college degree, you can apply for a subject-specific substitute license. Now if you have a BA in English, you can be an English class substitute in Ohio.
Pennsylvania has loosened up the rules as well, including letting near-graduated teacher program students sub and allowing retirees to sub without having to give up pension payments (though no retiree I know, including me, has gotten a call from a district to step in). This measure would loosen things up more. But what raised the question is part of the Post-Gazette’s rationale:
Knowledge of the subject matter is the most important component of teaching.
[Is it, I ask? And if not, what is?]
I am a huge believer in the importance of subject matter knowledge. When you are standing in a classroom, there is no substitute for knowing what the hell you’re talking about. It helps enormously with classroom management and earning the respect of your students (yes, you have to earn that). It helps you stay fast on your feet and adapt to whatever kind of teachable moment presents itself.
I’m not saying you have to be the world’s foremost expert, nor is your job to strut your stuff as the smartest person in the room. But a teacher who plans to get by … just following the textbook makes me cringe. It’s the difference between being a guide who knows the paved path to the destination, but is stumped if anyone takes one step off the asphalt, and a guide who knows every part of the territory, on the path and off, and can guide you to any spot from any other spot. I want a classroom with the latter.
But teaching also involves being able to convey that knowledge you have. Everyone knows (and some have experienced) the cliche of the person who’s really smart but can’t actually explain what they know to anyone else. You can’t be a good guide if you arrived at the destination with no idea how you got there and the only advice you can offer others is to keep hollering, “Well, just go to the place!” You have to be able to break the trip into comprehensible pieces.
And that means you have to understand your audience and read the room. You have to be able to communicate with the young humans that you are supposed to be teaching. For the younger students in particular this means some exceptional communication and empathic skills are required of teachers. If you can’t read the room, every teachable moment will fly right past you and every opportunity will be lost.
And you have to be in charge, but not a tyrant. You have to maintain the safe learning space, which means all those people skills have to be harnessed in service of balancing all the needs in front of you.
Yes, there are plenty of pieces of conventional wisdom that dance around this issue.
“I want them to love learning.” And that’s absolutely the important goal, and you can only achieve it if you know something to teach them and are able to do so.
“We teach students, not subjects.” Sure. What do you teach them? I get the point of this one, that we should not get so caught up in our material that we get things backward and think that the students are there to serve the content instead of vice versa. But we still have to teach the students something.
“Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.” Honestly, I don’t know a teacher who still sticks closely to the sage model and just stands up there bloviating away the days, but it would be a lousy model to follow….
“We’re all just here to learn together and I’m just one more learner and they teach me as much as I teach them.” If you don’t know more about what you’re teaching than your students do, just go home. You are the grown up adult specialist. That is the gig. If you don’t know more than the students, if you are not the expert guide on the learning journey, then what exactly are the taxpayers paying you for? Your heart can be as big as all outdoors, but your brain needs to be full, too.
None of this means you have to be an all-knowing teacherbot who is the supreme authority on all matters, just standing in the classroom spewing forth your infallible wisdom.
All of this is a lot of work, and constant work because teaching is about balancing a whole bunch of things and the weight is always shifting so you can never ever get into a stance and think, “Well, I can just lock this down exactly here.”
Which means on top of all the rest, you have to want to do the job. You have to want to succeed, to do everything that’s called for. You have to want to teach, not just grab a paycheck or add a line on your resume. You have to give a shit. You have to care.
So I’m torn, because in my mind, almost everything on the list rests on knowing your content. Except the desire to do the job. But of the two, content knowledge is the element that can be learned. I don’t know how to teach you to give a shit about teaching, but I know lots of ways for you to learn the content so that you can do the job.
So I think I have to put knowledge of subject matter at #2, right behind “Want to do the job.” Which is why I suspect the Ohio idea won’t help much, just like most of these bar-lowering warm-body-recruiting ideas aren’t helping all that much. It’s easy to find people with college degrees and warm bodies, but the people who want to teach and really care about the work are already there.
If you are a policy maker (or newspaper publisher) who imagines that there are millions of folks just dying to teach and the only thing holding them back is some paperwork, then you have some subject matter knowledge problems of your own.
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 
For me, there are seven pillars of effective teachers:
Knowledge, passion, clarity, love, labor, creativity and imagination, and sense of humor.
What drives individuals to be teachers is a combination of those “pillars” you cite. No argument there. But what keeps teachers teaching over time and staying at the top of their game requires different combos of those “pillars.” Wouldn’t you say?
Hi Larry—thanks for this—I 100% agree. For me, expanding content knowledge through one’s own PD or personal reading is key–after all, we’d want our doctors or lawyers to be conversant with the latest medical procedures or legal arguments, so why not teachers of history/social studies being conversant with what the latest scholarship is in their fields of teaching?
For the latter, I point to Hannah Arendt’s essay on The Crisis in Education (1958). To paraphrase her last para, she says that it’s up to us teachers to love our students enough to take responsibility for the world as it is and hand to them the knowledge of it so they can bring about their own renewal.
Thanks, David, for taking the time to comment. The issue remains, however, that teaching, like any other profession, gets repetitive and how veteran teachers keep the spark lit year after year remains an individual task, sometimes aided by smart district staff development programs. More often than not, however, such programs remain in a distinct minority.
Hi Larry, I do wonder if those drivers of self-motivation differ between age grades and areas of study. I’m now in Year 28 of teaching and have no issues staying fresh, but I’m constantly reading in my field of history. Is the same true for math or language teachers? What about at the primary levels–is that more a function of how to teach than content areas? There’s research that de-motivators for teachers across the board are classroom behavior, lack of administrative support, and then pay. Are these the things to fix?
We’ve seen multiple attempts to change pay structures, focus on evals, and push various initiatives from ed tech to growth mindset, but do these really move the needle? I don’t know–I always think of the convos about Finland when it was the Hot Ed Thing, and one of those revolved around how teachers were treated as professionals akin to doctors and lawyers in a way we don’t really have here in the US. Maybe that’s the answer, but would require a sea change in attitudes towards teachers, which then starts to hit political minefields.
There are two points in your reply, David, that I want to say a few words about. First, teaching over time, in your case, 28 years means that you have found ways of stretching your intellect and keeping fresh for the annual cycle of students who enter and leave your classroom. Second, you have sustained a strong internal motivation to teach and you have found ways to constantly renew yourself intellectually. That is both a gift and a self-discipline that many–but not all–veteran teachers (and professionals in lawyering, doctoring, engineering, etc.) have. Your students are the beneficiaries of your self-renewal and self-discipline.
Pingback: OTR Links 01/17/2024 – doug — off the record
No many teachers care to speak of this, but at the heart of everything in my own career has been love of subject and students. It was not only a quality that kept me going for 27 years, it was also the one quality I saw in the teachers who most inspired me to follow in their footsteps. When I started teaching myself, it was also the quality I saw in those teachers around me who were most loved and respected by their students. If we love our subjects, then we obviously respect its value and convey that immense respect to our students.
You are right to stress the importance of subject knowledge. When I first taught church history to advanced level students in the UK, I achieved the best results the school had for 30 years. Although I was obviously inexperienced as a teacher, the 40 books I devoured on my subject – a book a week – helped me to share with great passion everything I had learned. My students were kind enough to say that my passion and love for my subject helped to make lessons engaging enough to enjoy. In terms of teaching skills, I also got very good at analyzing past examination papers and managed to predict eight topics that would come up in the final exam. My students had to write two essays in 90 minutes in their final exam, and they were delighted that ‘early church heresies’ and ‘the Reformation’ were on the paper as I’d identified them as subjects they were required to write essays on for course work.
Love has been at the heart of everything I did for 27 years at the chalk face. I am now a school governor in the UK and I mentor new teachers. Love is the one quality I still look for and see in great teachers. To paraphrase St Paul, ‘If I have not love, I am merely making noises’.
Thank you so much, Coach, for your candid reply to the post about love of subject matter and students. Both are so entwined in the hearts and minds of teachers as they meet their classes or individual students every morning.