Using their knowledge about: teachi

Using their knowledge about: teaching and learning to teach must involve making connections and combining the types of knowledge. As Grossman (2002: 9) suggests, we need to attend to teacher knowledge as a system, rather than as a set of isolated understandings.Various terms for this have been used by other researchers. In looking at the work of mathematics teachers, Ma (1999） uses the phrase 'knowledge packages',while Tobin et al. (1990) talk about science 'teachers' mind frames'. In this chapter we want to look at how important decisions about history teaching are informed by different types of teacher knowledge and to do this we focus closely on two aspect of our teachers' practice: their goals for their lessons and the activities they chose to use. We present you with examples of how teacners talked about their goals for lessons and then what they told us about their choice of particular activitie. We quote verbatim from our interviews with them. After each set of examples we offer our commentary on what they said and what it suggested to us about the teachers' use of knowledge.

Goals for history lessons

Our interviews with the teachers revealed that they had clear goals for the lessons we observed. They also hạd goals for each part of the lesson and they offered extensive rationales to explain why they were teaching as they were and what they saw as the purposes of the lesson and its associated activities.Here we focus on their goals for whole lessons.

Two of these lessons - the Year 9 lesson on Hitler and the Year 7 lesson on castles - were typical of the ones we saw. The goals for the lessons were firmly focused on the historical understandings that the teachers wanted the pupils to develop. Most of the goals for whole lessons were of this type. But the two Year 10 lessons reveal other important priorities. In the case of the lesson on Robin Hood the teacher wanted the pupils to understand the nature of film as a source of evidence about both the past and the present. The substantive history - Robin Hood - was important, but so too was a life skill about understanding that films have messages that need decoding. A key goal for the lesson on Northern Ireland was enabling the pupils to cope with the challenges that their coursework would present. Our teachers' goals were not only or just about history: as educators, they had other concerns too.

In each case, it was evident that diverse types of knowledge informed their choices of goals. The teacher of the Hitler lesson was drawing on his knowledge of history and why Hitler came to power, and he was also drawing on his knowledge of the pupils and, specifically, that they might begin with no clear sense of there being reasons for this. He was also drawing on his knowledge of the pupils in this particular class and his understanding that for some,recognizing and understanding just one of these one of these reasons would be enough.