Maja Planinić
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science,
University of Zagreb
Teaching requires reinterpretation of subject
knowledge to make it comprehensible to
student.
 Teacher = interpreter
 What makes a good (effective) teacher?
 Neither content knowledge nor generic
teaching skills alone are sufficient for
effective teaching!
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Specific type of knowledge which combines
subject content knowledge with pedagogical
knowledge, and knowledge about typical
difficulties in teaching a specific topic.
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“..the way of representing and formulating a
subject to make it comprehensible to others”
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“special amalgam of content and pedagogy”
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“knowledge of subject matter for teaching”
(Shulman, 1986)
(Adapted from Etkina, 2011)
subject matter
representation
and instructional
strategies
student learning
and conceptions
general
pedagogy
curriculum and
media
context, purpose
and assessment
(Lee & Luft, 2008)
Modern paradigm:
active engagement
inquiry based teaching
PCK needs to be
acquired in the same
environment
Most students have
not experienced such
teaching before
PCK
declarative
procedural
founded on research
on student thinking
and ideas in physics
(PER)
can be developed
only through
teaching
Teacher understands the content: key ideas and possible main stumbling points
for students
knows students’ most common naive reasoning patterns and students
mathematical difficulties
makes decisions about what is the best approach to content for the specific group
of students
organizes the lesson so that these ideas are probed and discussed (e.g. clicker
questions), plans experiments which will challenge them, leads Socratic dialogue
plans and performs assessment
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complex and demanding task
PCK is highly topic specific – no type of
“general” methods course will do
several courses help form different aspects of
physics PCK
The courses must be deeply physics based
and cover all relevant topics from the
curriculum.
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Physics school experiments lab (4+0) –
semesters 7 and 8
Methods of teaching physics (2+2) –
semesters 9 and 10
Physics teaching practice (4+0) - semesters 9
and 10
Large enrollment: ca. 50 students per year
8 weeks
 Foundations and justification for the inquiry based teaching
 How people learn – active engagment teaching methods
 How do we know what we know in physics – nature of science
 Scientific reasoning and modeling
 Mathematical tools in school physics and students’ difficulties
with their use
 The role of experiments in physics teaching – analysis and
presentation of measurement results
 Students’ alternative conceptions – techniques for induction
of conceptual change
 Assessment in physics and construction of school tests
7+15 weeks
Key ideas, student difficulties and instructional
strategies related to:
 Newtonian mechanics
 conservation laws
 fluid mechanics
 particulate nature of matter
 thermodynamics
 electricity and magnetism
 oscillations and waves
 optics
 special theory of relativity and quantum physics
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Physics curriculum
How to prepare a lesson – the structure of the
lesson
How to write a lesson plan
Operationalization of key physics concepts
through tutorials, cooperative problem
solving, interactive derivations, computer
simulations, experiments
Student teachers teach their peers.
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Student teachers learn how to perform
experiments and how to use them in teaching
ca. 100 experiments
Student teachers present experiments to their
peers
Student teachers:
 observe teaching in schools and on
videotaped lessons
 prepare and teach several lessons at schools
 observe other student teachers when they
teach
 reflect on their own teaching and report to
the whole group
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How much teaching practice is needed?
How to organize it more effectively?
How to train the mentoring teachers?
Large enrollment
PCK is difficult to measure - much of PCK is tacit
knowledge
Many dilemmas:
 Is PCK a property of an individual or is it a
community agreement on how to best teach a
certain topic?
 Is PCK completely tacit or can teachers articulate
it?
 Can it be measured directly or only through
classroom observation?
 Is it domain specific or topic specific?
 Still no definite consensus on these questions
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declarative part can be evaluated through tests or
oral exams
Example:
What will happen to the
brightness of the bulb A
if we remove bulb B from its holder?
Explain your answer.
Which student answer on
this question would suggest
that student is using sequential
reasoning about the electrical
circuit? Explain your answer.
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procedural part can only be evaluated by
observing the teaching
scoring rubrics
Some guidelines:
 They should learn physics through the same methods
that they are expected to use when teaching.
 They should acquire knowledge of how people learn
in general and how they learn physics in particular.
 They should engage in teaching in environments that
mirror the environments that we want them to create
later.
 Constant switching of perspectives (student’s,
teacher’s, scientist’s view) helps form PCK
 It is important to critically reflect on and interpret the
subject matter and one’s own teaching.
 They should discuss teaching with other teachers
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(Etkina, 2010 ; Cochran, 1997 )
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Have realistic expectations
It is hard to expect students to fully make the
complex transition from students to teachers
in one or two years
Evaluations from students are very positive
At the end of the course, most students are
able to plan and conduct a physics lesson,
but they still have a long way to go.
teaching is difficult, but teaching to teach is
even more difficult
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Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational
Researcher, 15, 4-14.
Lee, E., & Luft, J. (2008). Experienced secondary science teachers’ representation of
pedagogical content knowledge. International Journal of Science Education, 30(10), 13431363.
Riese, J., Vogelsang, C. & Reinhold, P. (2012). Pre-service physics teachers‘
pedagogicalcontent knowledge in different teacher education programs. In Bruguière, C.,
Tiberghien, A., & Clément, P. (Eds.),E-Book Proceedings of the ESERA 2011 Conference:
Science learning and Citizenship. Lyon, France: European Science Education Research
Association
Gardner, A.L. & Gess-Newsom,,J. A PCK Rubric to Measure Teachers’ Knowledge of
Inquiry-‐Based Instruction Using Three Data Sources, Annual NARSTmeeting, Orlando,
2011.
Etkina, E. (2010). Pedagogical content knowledge and preparation of high school physics
teachers, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6, 020110 .
S. Magnusson, J. Krajcik, & H. Borko, Nature, sources and development of pedagogical
content knowledge for science teaching.In J. Gess-Newsome & N. G. Lederman (Eds.),
Examinining pedagogical content knowledge:The construct and its implications for
science education (pp. 95-133). (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1999)
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Cochran, K. F. (1997). Pedagogical content knowledge: Teachers’ integration of subject
matter, pedagogy, students and learning environment.
https://www.narst.org/publications/research/pck.cfm