Teachers Media International
Subjects
A landing area for subject-specific teaching resources — physics, English, maths, history, PE, and beyond. The idea is that professional development in teaching is often most useful when it's rooted in the specific pedagogical challenges of a particular subject, not just generic advice about "good teaching".
About this area
Subject-specific pedagogy — sometimes called pedagogical content knowledge, following Lee Shulman's influential 1986 formulation — is the knowledge a teacher has of how their particular subject is best taught. It's different from generic pedagogy (which might apply across subjects) and different from pure subject knowledge (which might apply outside teaching contexts). It's the specific expertise of, say, a chemistry teacher knowing that pupils typically confuse chemical and physical change, and having a set of demonstrations and questions that reliably shift the misconception.
The last decade of UK education has seen a strong shift toward taking subject-specific pedagogy seriously, particularly through subject associations (the ASE for science, the AfPE for physical education, the Historical Association, and so on), the Chartered College's subject-specific writing, and the growth of subject-focused CPD outside the generic teaching-and-learning space. The evidence supports it: pupils tend to learn more from teachers with strong pedagogical content knowledge in their specific subject.
This area of the site groups resources by subject. Wherever possible, look for CPD that's specifically about the subject you teach — not just about "questioning" or "feedback" in the abstract, but about how questioning works in a maths lesson, or how feedback lands in a science practical, or how it feels different in a KS3 English classroom.
Where to look next
- Science: Physics — Cartesian diver, KS3 physics — sound, Chemistry demonstrations, Our universe and the Big Bang.
- English: Teaching Great Expectations, Limbo and Night of the Scorpion, Grammar in secondary English, Punctuation and commas.
- Maths: KS1–KS2 division, KS2 geometry.
- History: The Victorians, Gifted and talented history: causal reasoning.
- PE: Inclusive physical education.
- Cross-subject teaching craft: Dylan Wiliam on formative assessment, Pedagogy, Collaborative enquiry.
Discussion prompts
- What are the two or three biggest pedagogical challenges specific to your subject, and where do you go to develop your practice on them?
- How does your department invest in subject-specific CPD versus generic teaching-and-learning CPD? Is the balance right?
- Which subject association do you belong to (if any), and what has membership actually given you?