Getting your Subject knowledge up and running

One of the QTS (Qualified Teacher Standards) standards you have to meet is about having sufficient historical knowledge to teach with (Q14). No one begins the course with all the subject knowledge they need. The curriculum for history is too vast for that to be the case. So, your responsibility is to ensure you have all the knowledge you need. It is best to start working on this over the summer before you arrive. It is a given that you will have the skills to gain new historical knowledge and we recommend you consider how you best learned new knowledge as an undergraduate or on your Masters course if you completed one. The techniques you used can transfer to this year of study too . Where a lot of the ways of learning and certainly all the ways in which you are assessed are going to be substantially different from your prior learning experiences the successful learning strategies you already have should come with you when looking at the knowledge you develop for teaching.

Stages in preparing your subject knowledge development began at interview but are now more concrete for you.

Stage 1. a)Completion of the subject Knowledge Audit sent to you in the pre-course materials. The original deadline of 1st June has been extended to 14th June. Thank you to those of you who have sent this to me already.
b) receive a list of priorities for reading and knowledge development for before the course starts from me.
c) Start Reading, keeping a record of your reading in the log I send you

Stage 2. Set up a blog using the instructions I send to you. Prior to the course start you are expected to develop a blog to demonstrate your growing knowledge. It is important to discuss the content and audience of your blog with me to ensure it works as a means of consolidating your subject knowledge and developing it alongside your early ideas about teaching the topics you are learning about.

Stage 3. Decide, with me a specialist expertise area of your own knowledge in which you can act as a specialist for others in the group. this is usually but not exclusively derived from your dissertation work. Again make sure this is discussed with me before you launch in to blogging about it.

This whole set of exercises are designed to do the following:

• Give you a good start in developing the knowledge you need before you need it. You will have high workloads planning lessons and evaluating them each day and this squeezes the time you have for reading around your subject. The quality of your teaching will depend very much on how good your knowledge of the subject is.


• begin to help you make the connections between subject knowledge and knowledge of how to teach history.


• give you experience of writing online in a blog to see how this impacts on your learning - putting you in the position of learning in a new way to see how it feels, how it works for you. (it is perfectly in order for you to reflect on this in your blog if you wish to do so)


• Allow you to develop a blog in an area of history you are already expert in - as a comparison with the experience of writing about topics you are a relative novice in.

Once you as a group are up and running with you blogs I will, with your permissions, share links so you can all see each others' blogs.