ABSTRACT
It is essential that beginning teachers have secure substantive knowledge for every lesson that they teach. This is a teacher’s basic professional responsibility. This chapter outlines a range of practical suggestions for mentors to support beginning teachers to select, deploy, and explain subject knowledge in a way that will make sense to the pupils they teach. The chapter considers strategies for approaching subject knowledge with beginning teachers so that they are not overloaded and can stay organised. There is also practical advice for inducting beginning teachers into their department’s approach to developing subject knowledge. The chapter considers the longer-term objective of allowing beginning teachers more autonomy to adopt dispositions which will enable them to develop further as history teachers once the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) year is completed. Beginning teachers need to be made aware of the necessity to keep up to date with new developments in history teaching, and the chapter provides a range of practical suggestions and resources to support the development of beginning teachers’ subject knowledge.
