How do you articulate PCK?

The Content Representation (CoRes) and Pedagogical and Professional-experience Repertoires (PaP-eRs) are two commonly used tools that support the articulation of PCK (Loughran et al., 2006). The CoRe tool explores educators’ thinking when it comes to understanding and preparing to teach specific content to students. PaP-eRs explore educators’ reflections on how and why they taught a particular topic. CoRes and PaP-eRs can be combined and explored together, which is known as a ‘resource folio’. This resource guides you to use the CoRe tool for capturing and developing PCK.

What does the CoRe tool look like?

The CoRe tool includes a series of prompts that engage educators in planning and reflecting on a specific content topic, asking them to identify the central concepts associated with that topic. Once identified, educators provide written responses to a series of prompts including, what students should learn about each big idea, why that idea is important to know, what students typically struggle to conceptualise related to the idea, specific teaching strategies designed to promote students’ learning about the idea and ways of assessing student understanding of the idea (Shultz et al, 2018).

CoRe prompts from Schultz et al., 2018.

  1. Identify one ‘big idea’ (or topic) that you teach.
  2. What is most important for students to know about this idea?
  3. Why is it important for students to know this?
  4. What do you know about your students' thinking that influences your teaching of this idea?
  5. What teaching strategies will you use?
  6. Why have you chosen these teaching strategies to engage students with this idea?
  7. What was the source of these teaching strategies?
  8. How will you ascertain students' understanding or confusion around this idea after teaching them?

Use this blank CoRe tool. (MSWord 1 page)

A CoRe can be completed by an individual or a group of educators. When used by an individual, the CoRe offers both a method for eliciting PCK and a tool for capturing PCK as educators document and reflect on their teaching goals and practices. When used with a group of educators, the CoRe provides a sharing platform for practice wisdom about how to teach particular content and a process for building collective professional knowledge. Thus, CoRe can potentially simultaneously collect sophisticated PCK from expert educators, accelerate PCK development among novice educators and promote collective professional practice knowledge within a community of educators.

A CoRe is always considered a work in progress - that is, it is not meant to represent ‘the best’ or ‘the only’ way to teach particular content to particular groups of students. It is a living document that can be revised, refined, and developed as educators engage with the content, pedagogy and students.