THOSE WHO CAN, DO. THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND, TEACH.

In my first year at the University of the Western Cape, in the second semester, I had class with Mr. Martin Hendricks who kept telling the class that all we need to pass his module is some “koppenosity”.  I only realized what he meant three-quarters of the way through my second year when Mr. Frans Weitz talked about “prior knowledge” and how important prior knowledge is in biology.

Prior knowledge s the knowledge students bring with them.  Those things that is already there.  The problem is that this prior knowledge is in many cases not much help because it is wrong, or in a lot of instances it is missing all together because students rely too much on their short term memory, i.e. cramming for tests and exams.  So how do you as a teacher get things to stick with the students?  The paper titled “Those who understand; Knowledge growth in teaching” by Lee S. Shulman (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1175860) tries to explain what is needed to be a good teacher.  This comes down to three types of knowledge, these are:

1)   Content knowledge, or the understanding that teachers have about the subject they are teaching.  This understanding is not simply knowing definitions and theories, but in depth knowledge and understanding of those definitions and theories.  This also implies that teachers have to stay up-to-date with new developments in the field so that their students can get the best knowledge.  Content knowledge is important because students ask questions, or if they don’t understand something, you as the teacher need to be able to explain and give them examples, because it’s those examples that tend to stick with the students.

2)   The second type is the knowledge teachers should have of resources that could assist them in their teaching, i.e. things they could bring into their lesson plan that can help the students understand the content being taught.

3)  Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) or how teachers bring the content to the students.  These include diagrams, tasks, group discussions, debated, concept maps and many more.  To find the best way to bring content to students is reliant on the teacher knowing what makes the course difficult, and what it is the students already know, “prior knowledge or koppenosity”, even if it is wrong.  It is important for the teacher to find out if the prior knowledge is correct before they move on and if not, to first fix the misconceptions the students have.  A good example of a different way of teaching can be seen in the paper titled: A genetics game by Haws and Bouer (http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4451171.pdf?acceptTC=true).  Here students are able to see the effects of genetic variation, gene flow, mutation and dominant and recessive traits when they build their own organism.  Due to the fact that it is so different, students will not only enjoy it, but theoretically, they should grasp the content better because they are doing it themselves.

Different students have different ways of studying, and you as teacher needs to know what ways your students prefer, and your lesson plan should accommodate more than one type.  George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “He who can, do. He who cannot, teaches”, but this can easily be changed to “Those who can, do. Those who understands, teaches (Lee S. Shulman), if teachers embrace these three types of knowledge.