Subject knowledge and mentoring: my talk at Teach First

Clio et cetera

I am delighted to be here this afternoon to talk to this audience. My talk this afternoon proceeds in three stages.

1. The problem of generic approaches to teacher education, where generic means ‘not subject-specific’
2. How we might rethink teaching as a subject-specific practice.
3. What this looks like in the context of preparing mentors.

In this talk I am going to be drawing on a number of sources, including my own doctoral research into the subject-specific nature of history teacher discourse, my experiences as a history mentor in the Cambridge partnership, and more recently my experiences of working with novice and experienced teachers in a multi-academy trust.

My background is in mentoring and training trainees in secondary history, although a lot of my recent work has been with primary school teachers, and, although I would want to exercise a little more restraint and caution in my conclusions when discussing primary, I…

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