Content Knowledge
“The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make these aspects of the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content.”
This was one standard that my cooperating teacher and evaluator kept telling me was a strength. I did not quite agree with them. I was a history undergraduate, not a political science guy. So, I know history, but not government so much. In order to be prepared for class I would spend hours on the Internet trying to prepare myself for the next day’s material. I guess I did fairly good job if they thought it was a strength.
Content knowledge has always been a strength of mine in history, even when I was a mechanical engineering major. I love history and I soak up as much of it as I can; through books, movies, the Internet, anyway I can get it. I have a passion for history. You can see this in my Praxis scores which are fairly high.
Two papers that I wrote as an undergrad really show my understanding of central concepts, as well as tools of inquiry. The first of these was on the Vietnam War and, namely the resistance to it. This showed how well I can use the tools of inquiry to find what I am looking for. I looked through the Internet, copies of old Virginia Tech underground newspapers, books, microfilm, and journals. I was able to use these to draw conclusions about the motivations and intentions of the resistance movements on college campuses. In the second paper, I was asked by a professor to write a thirty-page paper on an original topic in the Atlantic World before 1905. Good luck finding one! Anyway, I wrote about the Hessians at the Battle of Trenton. Historians have accredited this victory to the drunkenness of the Hessians the day after Christmas. I proved this theory as a myth. While this was a huge challenge I thoroughly enjoyed it and it most certainly tested my ability to research and my content knowledge. It was also awesome to be able to change content knowledge. I was taught in high school that the Hessians were drunk so to help change a common myth was awesome.