Yes, he knew very well how he can complete his task of teaching.
It seems obvious that, if you are going to teach a subject, then you should really know a lot about the subject, right? Certainly in high schools, where teachers often specialise into one or two subject areas, there is a real emphasis on the subject matter knowledge of the teacher - which is why, the claim goes, that if you want to teach history, you should first learn a lot about history, and if you want to teach mathematics, then you should get a degree in mathematics.
One Chapter Ahead of the Students…
It is surprising, then, that there is relatively little evidence supporting this claim. Instead, it seems as if it has been accepted as a truism by many educators, and not investigated further - it is just a ‘given’. What evidence there is, however, suggests that there is much less correlation between teacher subject knowledge and student achievement than one might reasonably expect. John Hattie, a New Zealand education academic, identified that subject matter knowledge was really only a minor consideration in student achievement. Hattie conducted a meta-analysis of more than 1000 educational studies which identified 138 different factors that influenced student learning. The required effect size for a student to make a year’s progress was 0.4. According to Hattie, teacher subject-matter knowledge had an effect size of 0.19, meaning that it was far less effective than other factors like classroom management (0.52) or effective teacher feedback (0.75).
It would be easy to conclude, based on Hattie’s work, that subject matter knowledge is unimportant, and that teachers can teach with abandon outside their subject area. This kind of argument is not completely unfamiliar to elementary or primary school teachers, who are often required to be generalists - and often acknowledge that they don’t have the same level of subject knowledge as high school teachers. In this case, teachers can afford to be one topic ahead of the students in their teaching.
Not so Fast…
Of course, as with many other things in education, the answer is much more complicated than that. Hattie revisited this topic in a later book, Visible Learning for Teachers (2011) where he discussed the fact that expert teachers can make use of their subject knowledge to organise and use content knowledge more effectively for their students to understand. In addition, expert teachers are more likely to be able to respond to the needs of any particular classroom, recognising students who are struggling and changing the way the information is presented in order to make it more understandable.