Subject scholarship as a mechanism for developing trainees’ reflective practice and teachers’ curricular thinking

In considering the importance of knowledge and subject-specialist teaching, Lambert (2018) highlights that ‘the curriculum: the quality of its contents, its sequencing and its enactment are all curriculum enactment responsibilities that fall to teachers’ (p. 363). Therefore, any concern for developing high-quality curriculum cannot be separated from how teachers’ curriculum understanding is developed and subject expertise is sustained. In this article, I will highlight the importance of subject scholarship in the mentoring of trainee teachers, drawing on my experience as a mentor and reflecting on the model developed within the University of Cambridge history PGCE (Counsell, 2012). This article seeks to illuminate the significance of subject-specific scholarship in the context of  ‘taking curriculum seriously’ (Counsell, 2018a). Subject scholarship within the mentoring of trainee teachers Reading about the principles for the usefulness of educational research for trainee t