For decades, teacher professional learning in middle and high school has prioritized one thing above all else: pedagogy.
To be certain, pedagogy matters. Teachers must attune to the practices that allow learning to flourish. But as the field has over-indexed on pedagogy, it has under-indexed on content, or the knowledge those practices are meant to open a gateway to. We’ve doubled down on how to drive instead of where the car is going.
I remember spending hours learning instructional strategies: how to run small groups, facilitate Socratic seminars, and use graphic organizers. During one particularly misguided era, I sat through training on the now-debunked “learning styles,” puzzling over how to teach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to “musical” and “visual” learners. My districts focused on how to deliver material, not on deepening my understanding of the material itself.
A quick scan of old observations confirms my memory. “Class discussion” and “questioning strategies appeared random and designed to maximize student involvement” are consistently ticked off, identifying me as an effective teacher. Concerningly, there was almost nothing to evaluate my content knowledge or accuracy. The message was clear: pedagogy matters more than content.
Sometimes, my district did deliver small doses of content professional learning. However, this kind of PL existed mostly as a launchpad back into pedagogy: how to teach the complex text, not deepen teachers’ understanding of the text itself. Administrators, too, were told they didn’t need subject-matter expertise to evaluate instruction; “you know good teaching when you see it,” was (and may still be) the reigning mantra. Leaders became adept at recognizing good teaching performance, but too often were unequipped to recognize good content delivery and, in kind, good content learning.
Over the past several years, I’ve found myself in conversations with educators about what I now think of as the quiet content crisis in American schools: whispered exchanges in conference hallways, frustrated debriefs after professional learning sessions. Across math, science, reading, and language arts, the concern is remarkably consistent: deep content knowledge is lacking. We are not Chicken Littles running under blue skies; we are canaries in the coal mine, warning of an impending disaster.
But education already is rife with disasters and handwringing. We cannot unring the bell, but we can get it to ring a different tune. We can turn crisis to opportunity, resulting in better teaching and learning.
Teaching literacy requires deep content knowledge
In literacy education, the problem is particularly acute. It has become harder to find teachers who can confidently explain the difference between a phrase and a clause and articulate the relationship between syntax and meaning. Many teachers facilitate collaborative discussions with ease. But they struggle to unpack the grammatical complexity of the texts their students are reading, though sentence-level comprehension requires grammatical acuity.
I was that teacher.
Early in my career, I taught high school English language arts (ELA). I was assigned Grammar for College, a class that got deep into the weeds of grammar. I didn’t think much about it because I already had strong applied grammatical knowledge.
By week two, I was way beyond my skis. I knew how to write a grammatically correct sentence, but the terms “predicate nominative” and “predicate adjective” eluded me. I couldn’t follow the textbook, let alone teach it. One day as I was muddling my way through, a more experienced English teacher walked into my class. She watched me teach for a few minutes and left. That afternoon, she came to me and gently said, “All of that was wrong. Do you understand this?”
The jig was up.
Her next comment was most important. She said, “Oh, none of us understood this. You’ve got to go, right now, and tell Ms. Hayes. She’ll help you.”
I went to Ms. Hayes. Every day after school she taught me the mechanics of grammar the day before I had to teach it. I learned the content of grammar, a core component of ELA, from a master teacher who mentored me.
I knew how to put my students into cooperative groups. I did not know how to teach them what a comma splice was. That required a deep and flexible understanding of the content.
I know I’m not alone and that the problem extends to elementary schools and other disciplines, too. The science of reading movement was built, in part, on others saying the quiet part out loud: Some teachers weren’t taught how reading develops in the brain. Some teachers don’t know the content of reading, so it’s not being taught. As a result, states have spent millions of dollars and adopted dozens of policies trying to course-correct a content knowledge problem.
Ask many teachers how to organize a small group, and they know immediately. Ask them to distinguish theme from tone or topic and expect multiple competing answers. Ask a math teacher how to divide fractions, and they can. Ask what division means and expect a lot of confused looks back.
This is the predictable outcome of a pre- and in-service system that has deprioritized content expertise for decades, assuming degrees, certification, and licensure to be proxies for content knowledge. That assumption has proven dangerously flawed.
Undeniably, pedagogy is critical to learning. But pedagogy is not a substitute for content knowledge. A teacher cannot effectively teach what they do not deeply understand.
A classroom can look engaging while students learn very little. Excellence requires both pedagogical skill and intellectual authority. Strong pedagogy paired with weak content knowledge may create an engaging classroom, but one where misconceptions go unnoticed. Strong content knowledge paired with weaker pedagogy may create a technically accurate classroom, but one where students are disengaged so much they don’t learn.[1] However, strength in both will produce meaningful learning, because expertise lets teachers respond flexibly to the students in front of them.
The crisis
The consequences are visible in student literacy outcomes. Reading scores continue to stagnate or regress, as evidenced by both 2024 NAEP and 2026 PISA. Writing remains alarmingly unassessed at the federal level. If we want stronger literacy outcomes, we need stronger literacy inputs, beginning with educator knowledge of reading and writing development, comprehension, syntax, vocabulary, and rhetoric. If we want stronger math outcomes, we need teachers to have stronger mathematical knowledge and deeper mathematical conceptual understanding.
The opportunity
Middle and high school teachers deserve and need sustained opportunities to study their disciplines deeply, not just rehearse instructional routines. In language arts, this includes reading texts closely as adult readers, analyzing syntax and structure, and building real understanding of grammar and syntax.
We must reconsider how we evaluate teaching. Observations must move beyond engagement or participation. Leaders must also ask: Was the content accurate? Did the explanation deepen understanding? Were misunderstandings corrected? Organizations like EdBetter, which evaluate content and pedagogy, can serve as models and research hubs for how we may revise evaluation and coaching systems.
We can use this moment to re-envision an academic experience that places a premium on content knowledge. Leaders and teachers can build sustainable systems that:
- Redesign professional learning around disciplinary study, not just instructional strategy. Partner with universities and subject-matter experts to make expertise an ongoing endeavor. Teachers need opportunities to study language, math, science, and history deeply.
- Incorporate content accuracy into observations. Rubrics should evaluate whether explanations are precise and concepts are taught accurately.
- Prioritize content expertise in hiring and leadership development. Leaders and coaches should possess strong disciplinary knowledge themselves; schools cannot support teacher expertise if leadership lacks it.
[1] One of the worst teaching experiences I ever observed was a brand-new teacher, straight from a university setting, who was teaching middle school science. The man, undeniably, knew chemistry. He did not know seventh graders. He taught facing the board, almost the entire hour, as chaos reigned behind him. He had strong content knowledge, but his lack of pedagogical practice impeded learning. A few years later, I saw the same teacher. He was masterful. He’d learned how to engage middle schoolers.
