Articulating your own pedagogical content knowledge

Abstract

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) encompasses carefully selected analogies, examples, explanations and demonstrations used by a teacher to make a topic comprehensible to students. It includes an understanding of what makes the big ideas difficult to grasp, along with an awareness of common misconceptions. PCK is developed by teachers through practitioner experience. John Loughran and his colleagues have spent over a decade creating and refining tools to articulate and develop PCK at the secondary level. Their framework consists of two elements: CoRe (content representation) and PaP-eR (pedagogical and professional experience repertoire). The CoRe contains eight questions for a teacher to reflect on, each to be answered for each big idea to be taught in a module, and should be developed and refined over time among small groups of teachers.