Expert ‘teacher moves’ that impact student learning

In this comparative case study, I examine how two expert American high school teachers design, organise and teach their classes to identify teacher pedagogical ‘content moves’ that are either subject-specific or cross-subject. This project provides a potential starting point for devising a tangible teaching-learning framework for training pre-service and novice teachers. Literature Pedagogical content knowledge encompasses teachers’ knowledge and understanding of subject-specific content and how to effectively teach it. Since 1986, when Lee Shulman first introduced teachers needing to extend beyond the ‘what’ of content to the ‘why’, a wealth of research has explored how teachers develop their knowledge of content and how to teach it in ways that build and strengthen student understanding. Empirical research sheds light on teachers’ difficulty in developing PCK (Ball et al., 2008). Despite this challenge, however, research suggests that it is possible for pre-servi