Joe Ames

17 March 2018
Reflection on InTASC 4: Content Knowledge
A teacher’s complete mastery of his/her content knowledge is an absolute must in order

to ensure that students acquire mastery themselves. The fourth InTASC standard is concerned

with a teacher’s understanding of the ideas, skills, and language that make up their content area.

Also, teachers must be able to make the discipline accessible to their learners. In order to achieve

this accessibility and transfer of mastery, teachers should utilize prior knowledge to help students

link new concepts to older, familiar ones. This can also be achieved by using culturally diverse

content when possible: students will be more likely to fully grasp new ideas when they are

presented in texts that are culturally familiar and relevant to them. In an English lesson that is

teaching students about the hero’s journey and archetypal figures, an educator could use popular

movies to get student’s attention. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Wizard of Oz all feature

examples of archetypal figures and follow along the trajectory of the hero’s journey. To make the

lesson inductive, students could be asked to group different characters from across the three

movies/franchises into categories. Afterwards, the class could discuss reasons why they grouped

characters the way they did, and then the educator could go over the discipline specific

archetypes to ensure students gain the academic language of the English discipline. This standard

illuminates the need for students to be genuinely interacting in a given discipline. Students need

to acquire the skills, tools of inquiry, specific academic language, and the methods of gathering

and evaluating evidence of the given field they are studying. Teachers need to make these

aspects of their field accessible and meaningful so that students are engaged and actively

learning the content.