RR 90-3 Making subject matter part of the conversation or helping beginning teachers learn to teach.
Abstract
To what extent and in what ways do issues about content and the teaching and learning of content figure in the conversations between novices and their mentors? This paper explores that question by means of four cases drawn from a larger data set about two different first-year teacher programs. The conversations are discussed in relation to four aspects of learning to teach academic content: (a) deepening ones' own understanding of subject matter; (b) learning to think about academic content from the students' perspective; (c) learning to represent subject matter in appropriate and engaging ways; and (d) learning to organize students for the purposes of teaching and learning academic content.