Using Knowledge Packets in Teacher Education to Develop Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Physical education teachers need to know their content and also how to teach their content. These two forms of knowledge are not the same. They can be distinguished as knowledge needed to perform content, called common content knowledge; and additional knowledge needed to teach the content, called specialized content knowledge. It is clear from the emerging research on content knowledge that strengthening preservice teachers' common content knowledge as well as specialized content knowledge is an important outcome in physical education teacher education. In this article we introduce the concept of a knowledge packet as a means to teach both common content knowledge and specialized content knowledge.