Teachers need to know how to transform the subject involved into a form that allows pupils to learn it.

Over the years, I have noticed that a considerable number of people believe they know all there is to know about teaching. They feel that their classroom experiences serve as an apprenticeship of teaching. They have observed various teachers at work and they feel this incidental ‘teacher-watching’ gives them all the pedagogical knowledge and skills they require to teach and that they require no further training.

For them, teaching is very simple – all you have to do to teach is to simply enter a classroom, tell pupils what they need to know, what to do, how to do it and when to do it. In addition, they will also argue that the only knowledge they require is knowledge of the subject they are going to teach.

Is teachers’ work that simple? Is teaching simply ‘telling’? Is know­ledge of the subject matter the only knowledge that is required to teach?

Trying to answer these questions outside of context is difficult. So let us try to contextualise this issue by taking the teaching of mathematics as an example. Some questions that will help us decide whether teaching is easy or not include:

Is teaching young children the intricacies of our decimal positional number system easy?

Is it a piece of cake to explain to young teenagers why the product of two negative numbers is a positive number?

Is it plain sailing to help a class of unmotivated adolescents make sense of algebraic equations?

Is it straightforward to help youths learn how to construct proofs in geometry?

One can easily add other examples of the same ilk within the teaching of mathematics, but these examples are sufficient for our purpose.

Teaching is a complex activity that requires the intertwining of different types of knowledge and skills with a number of appropriate dispositions

Is it true that performing these teaching tasks requires little else than common sense? How about the issue of the knowledge needed to teach? Is it enough to have mastery of these mathematical topics in order to teach them?

The truth is that the teaching these topics is not easy and does not come naturally. Moreover, simply knowing the mathematics required to teach these topics is far from being enough. One needs to know how to transform the mathematics involved into a form that allows pupils to learn it. One can substitute mathematics with other subjects from the school curriculum. The answer will still remain the same.

One way of seeing what teaching is and what expertise is required to teach is to focus on what teachers do on a daily basis. From this perspective teaching can be seen as consisting of a complex, cyclical process consisting of three main phases: a pre-active planning phase prior to a teaching episode, an interactive delivery phase during the teaching episode, and a reflective evaluation phase after the teaching episode.

Each of these phases is multifa­ceted and makes considerable demands on teachers’ knowledge and skills.

For instance, during the planning phase, teachers design and develop teaching episodes by: identifying the content they are going to teach; selecting appropriate methods through which they are going to present this content; and, choosing suitable activities that will help them assess their pupils’ learning.

During the delivery phase teachers teach their planned episodes by: making effective use of available resources; communicating with language suitable to their pupils; actively involving their pupils by asking questions designed to provoke pupils to think; setting challenging tasks; dealing with pupils’ queries; managing pupils’ responses; supervising and checking pupils’ work; balancing the diverse needs of individual learners with the needs of the whole classroom; juggling between academic and social goals; responding to unexpected classroom events; and, when necessary, dealing with inappropriate pupil behaviour.

After the lesson teachers: reflect on their performance in order to identify ways through which they can make their teaching more effective; assess their pupils’ work with the aim of identifying ways of helping pupils learn more; communicate with parents/guardians when required, and, update records of lessons and assigned work.

As can be seen, teaching is a complex activity that requires the intertwining of different types of knowledge and skills together with a number of appropriate dispositions.

That teaching is such an intricate and multifarious activity should give food for thought for all those who think that teaching is easy and requires little or no training except knowledge of the subject. It is important that everyone recognises that teaching is complex and requires quality pre-service and continuous in-service teacher education.

Leonard Bezzina is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education specialising in the teaching of mathematics.

(To be concluded)