2. A Map of Orientations to the Teaching of Bible

If we were to ask any educated person to name the qualities most associated with being “a good teacher,” one of the first things mentioned would be that a good teacher needs to know the subject matter. But in that simple phrase rests a great deal of complexity. What does it really mean to “know the subject matter”? And how does knowing the subject matter help the individual be a good teacher? Over the past twenty-five years, education researchers have been grappling with these questions, trying to make sense of the relationship between subject matter knowledge and good teaching. Pamela Grossman, one of the scholars in general education whose work is most relevant to Jewish education, has looked carefully at the importance of a teacher’s knowledge of subject matter for the teaching of English literary texts, and her work can be usefully applied to understanding the teaching of classical Jewish texts as well. Her approach to teacher knowledge, focusing as it does on “pedagogical content knowledge,”2 goes beyond the approach to subject-matter knowledge that characterized earlier research on teachers and teaching, which “found little or no relationship between teachers’ subject-matter knowledge and either pupil achievement or general teaching performance.”3 As Grossman points