Pedagogical Knowledge (Pedagogical Concepts)

Pedagogical Knowledge (Pedagogical Concepts)

Teach not only involves learning content and how to translate that subject matter into an understandable form. It also requiries knowledge about the process to teaching itself. Pedagogical knowledge is the information we gather from research and experience of expert teachers that help us understand connections between teaching and learning. To understand this idea, let’s look at Ibrahim—a teacher who has taught his students the process of adding fractions and is now reviewing this process with them.

“Class, look at this fraction on the board. What do we call the number on the bottom? Cica?”
“Umm...... denominator.”
“Good, Cica. And what do we call the number on the top, Ahmad?”
“..............”
“We talked about this yesterday, Ahmad. Remember, it tells us the number of parts in the fraction. Think about the term that is derived from, number.”
“Oh, yeah......numerator.”
“Excellent, Ahmad. Now look closely at this addition problem. It says to add ½ and 1/3. What do we have to do first? Think for a moment, because this is important. Look at the pies that I’ve drawn on the board to represent these different fractions.”

Ibrahim was trying to help his student do several things in this review. First, he wanted them to remember the names for the top and bottom number in a fraction—two concept that he had already taught. When Ahmad could not answer, Ibrahim provided a prompt that helped him respond correctly. After student recalled the terms numerator and denominator, he referred them to a problem on the board. Ibrahim illustrated the abstract problem with a concrete example to promote their understanding of the process. Finally he told them to pause for a moment—an idea called “wait-time”—encouraging them to take some time to think about why changing the denominator was important.

Review, concept, prompting, concrete examples, and wait-time are all pedagogical concepts. As such, they are part of professional body of knowledge that help us to analyze and understand the process of teaching. All education program is designed to help us understand these and many other pedagogical concepts, which will help us plan and implement effective lessons in our own classroom.

Key words: review, abstract concept, concrete example, prompting, wait-time, pedagogical concept, pedagogical knowledge, student, teacher, effective lesson