I have a thing with a particular use of Twitter. I do not understand the use of twitter as a discussion tool. Why try to interact using short comments when other equally accessible tools allow conversation at a greater depth. For example, why enter text segments limited to 140 characters when you could speak (Google hang outs). Why spam Twitter users with responses to a discussion that make no sense because they do not have access to the comments from others involved? Again, Google offers circles which represent a much more elegant way to define interested participants.
You should select the tool to fit the task rather than limit the task to fit the tool. This sounds like one of those quotes my wife loves to pass around. In general I am not a fan of brief and assumed pithy statements. Explaining complexity is not the same as being brief. Quote me if you must.
Anyway, I think I have encountered an example that makes my point. One of the individuals I follow on Twitter made a statement that I thought was ridiculous. This does happen on Twitter. I am not claiming that I am immune to transgressions. This is part of what I am trying to say – Twitter does not allow space for nuance.
A hashtag indicated the Twitter statement that caught my attention was part of a discussion so I decided to search for related tweets. This is how I located the group discussion. A key issue in the discussion seemed to involve the value of teacher content knowledge (it is now fashionable among the Ed tech types to describe technological, pedagogical and content knowledge). A position taken by several participants seemed to be that more knowledgeable teachers were somehow likely to be less effective. Certainly, I thought, this could not be what was intended.
Some examples (without names):
- The curse of knowledge: The more you know about your subject, the less you understand a novice’s questions.
- A cognitive bias: The more you know about your subject, the harder it is to appreciate how beginners approach a subject.
If you believe such a thing how would you act on such an assumption? Would you advocate for the hiring of college students with Cs rather than As in the content area they would eventually teach? Wouldn’t you really want future teachers with both passion for and understanding of the content area they are responsible for teaching?
This position caught my attention because I had just been reading a research article on the topic. (American Educational Research Journal – 2013, 50, 1020-1049.)
This study involved the modification of student faulty assumptions of scientific phenomena.
How do teacher science knowledge and awareness of common student impact their effectiveness in modifying student understanding? This seemed exactly the perfect way to test the comments from Twitter. Are understanding and an appreciation of the challenges of struggling students mutually exclusive?
The following is a short excerpt from the abstract:
“For items that had a popular wrong answer, the teachers who could identify this misconception had larger classroom gains, much larger than if the teachers knew only the correct answers. On items on which students did not exhibit misconceptions, teacher subject matter knowledge alone account for higher student gains.”
I read this to suggest that content knowledge and “content-related” pedagogical knowledge are different things, but I certainly see no support for the notion that less knowledgeable teachers are somehow more effective. There is no evidence that less background knowledge is somehow helpful.
Twitter participants sometimes need to express themselves in greater detail.