Earlier this week I got sucked into a stupid ‘debate’ about subject knowledge after making some comments on X and replying to some other posts. It seemed to me that various people – at least five, separate people – were posting about how important subject knowledge is and how it’s more important than generic teaching techniques. One poster was using ‘teaching techniques’ in quotes, as in… “there’s a lot more to teaching than some ‘teaching techniques’….scoff scoff” suggesting,… what… that teaching techniques aren’t really real or something? And they should definitely be put in their place. We even had the former HMCI – who has never actually taught a lesson – weighing in with ‘However attractive it appears to treat teaching as a stack of generic skills, it is an approach that short-changes children‘. Wow! That’s told us – HMCI really laying it on thick in the (empty) subject knowledge vs technique wars.

A popular genre of comment was of the form – you wouldn’t want a person with knowledge of X to do Y. You wouldn’t want a train driver to fly your plane. You wouldn’t want a plumber to wire your house. You wouldn’t want a synchronised swimmer to fix your nuclear power station. . (ok that last one was me, taking the mickey!). And then there was personal anecdote: I once had to teach dance, French, history, RE, a new topic at A level….and I can tell you, subject knowledge really matters!

So – what’s the issue? Well, I find it just so bizarre that people are arguing this point – that subject knowledge really matters in teaching – as if they’re waging some kind of campaign. Who is all this addressed to? Who is saying the opposite? I just don’t get it. Surely it is just absolutely true that you need to know the material you are teaching and that having expertise in a subject helps you ask questions and evaluate student outcomes and plan your next steps etc. Isn’t this just unquestionably obvious? I’ve tried to think of reasons people need to say all this stuff:

• A worry about a growth in non-specialist teaching, given recruitment pressures?
• Annoyance at the promotion of generic techniques (ie lots of chat on X about cold calling and whiteboards) – where subject specifics are not mentioned?
• Bad experiences of techniques like quizzing being made whole-school non-negotiables leading to them being deployed inappropriately in some subjects
• A general annoyance that subject specialism isn’t given enough time on PGCEs or in in-school CPD?
• A need to promote the whole knowledge-rich agenda feeling that it’s under threat?

I suppose all of those things are legitimate worries. But where I find it hard to process is when people set up a need for subject knowledge to the The Most Important Thing. As we should all know, there are three types of knowledge teachers need:

• Subject knowledge – knowing the subject as a discipline, the knowledge, the processes and skills embedded in it.
• Pedagogical Content Knowledge – PCK – knowing how to break down and sequence the content of a subject and engage students in learning it,
• General Pedagogical Knowledge – knowing how to run a room so that all students focus their attention, engage in questioning and general ideas about scaffolding, practice, retrieval and checking for understanding.

The thing is that there is no meaningful hierarchy here. This is three-legged stool territory, I don’t know why people find this hard to grasp.

None of the legs is more important – you need them all or it falls over. Literally nobody claims that all you need is a stack of generic teaching techniques… as if you can teach ‘without subject knowledge’. Surely we can do better than these binary positions. Each type of knowledge is, to me, best considered as a potential limiting factor. You only need enough of some types if the others are limiting the teaching. You want excess of each type but you don’t need even more subject knowledge if your PCK is the weakness. You don’t need even more subtle PCK if you’re skills in running the room mean you can’t engage the whole class. You don’t need even better classroom management if the big issue is that you don’t know the subject enough to teach it. And of course, all three interact.

The important question in any scenario is about the priorities for development, I’ve had my own issues in all three areas:

• Teaching lower set Year 7 or Year 10 maths. I knew the maths; I could run the room reasonably easily: my issue was the PCK: how to explain number concepts to students with weak prior knowledge. It was the hardest teaching I ever did and my HoD gave me tons of help – even though I’d been teaching for 25 years by then.
• Teaching non-specialist RE or Further Maths. I needed to do a lot of reading and prep to make sure I had the subject knowledge, which deepened the PCK I already had. Good schemes of work were a blessing.
• Teaching every lesson I ever taught: I might have the subject knowledge and strong PCK – but running the room with specific individuals, working my classroom management, my questioning skills – is never ever easy. It’s a workout every time. You never really master the general pedagogy.

And of course, I have a hundred examples of every permutation of these issues – like the English teacher with a PhD from Cambridge who found out that teaching wasn’t for her because she simply couldn’t deal with the continual human interactivity of running a responsive classroom, despite a lot of support and guidance. (I found Year 9s when I was about 26 absolutely nightmarish – my First Class degree in Physics wasn’t much use to me.)

In contrast, de facto, lots of teachers are very successful teaching outside of their subject specialisms – not least in primary schools where this happens every day. Teachers with good general skills can use excellent resources that set out sequences of knowledge with good reading and related tasks to teach students that content – without actually having strong subject knowledge themselves. It happens every day all the time. The difference is that with running the room, you’re on your own but with subject knowledge, using a well resourced scheme, help is always at hand.. In every school I’ve worked where we’ve taught all sciences at GCSE – you have the debate and my firm conclusion from those scenarios is that you’d rather your child was taught by a strong science teacher teaching out of specialism than a weaker teacher with a degree in the subject.

For me, the interesting thing and the real question is solving problems that present themselves in schools when I visit -and the typicality of this informs my reactions to these discussions. My perspective is that on my many many school visits, listening to teachers and leaders and conducting my own observations – the thing we end up talking about most often are the general pedagogical skills. Yes, the ‘teaching techniques’. Of course, sometimes the resources and sequencing of questions are problematic – the PCK needs to be addressed. Of course, sometimes teachers’ own subject knowledge needs developing. (I’ve seen teachers make terrible mistakes in science or misunderstand a poem or get lost solving a maths problem). But, to me, the most common issue is that the limiting factor is where teachers find it hard to run the room so that every student is learning. It’s the hardest thing – and it’s hard for everyone. If my school visits resulted in dominant discussions about the problem of teachers’ subject knowledge being a limiting factor, then my position would be different. But that’s not how it is.

My view is that too many experienced, knowledgeable teachers resist the idea that they need or even use ‘techniques’ that are generic – even when it is blatantly obvious that some learners are not systematically involved when they teach. This resistance – informed by a kind of pride or status attached to being a subject specialist – is really problematic. Teacher’s status should be as much about running a room as it is about knowing their subjects. And so, I worry when I see commentary from influential people that might reinforce the downplaying of lowly old questioning techniques! It’s really not helpful.

And then there is also the research evidence about the impact of CPD. The truth is that time spent improving subject knowledge doesn’t necessarily translate well into improved outcomes – whereas focusing on formative assessment techniques really can make a difference. You might spend a lot of time discussing nuances of a subject and the related PCK and find that student outcomes don’t change much at all – because the limiting factor is that teachers are not responding appropriately to students’ knowledge gaps, because they don’t run their lessons using standard techniques that allow those gaps to be identified.

To be honest I’ve surprised myself with my strength of feeling on this. DON’T DOWNPLAY TEACHING TECHNIQUES. It’s because this is where I feel the biggest gains are to be found and I guess I do get really bothered when I see arguments made that counter that – it’s hard enough as it is to mobilise teachers to look in this direction!