A thread on expert teachers

(Not comprehensive, just notes on what I have gathered from a week’s reading on this particular topic)

It is hard to define an ‘expert teacher’ because there is an interplay between what we do naturally (talent) and what we acquire through experience over time (deliberate practice).

This interplay travels some distance in explaining why the definitions of an expert teacher seem to change constantly (Rich, 1993).

While the definitions of an expert teacher may be fluid, there are characteristics of experts (generally) that are universally agreeable.

e.g. expert knowledge is built up over thousands of hours, which provides them with flexibility in their practice, they respond to situations based off of their familiarity to them and they have a certain degree of automaticity.

Each of these seems to be inextricably linked to experience. However, experience does not necessarily denote expertise. One does not become an expert teacher simply because they have taught for 10 years (often cited as the minimum time required to become an expert teacher).

So, expertise arises from not only experience, but motivation and interest too (Ericsson and Charness, 2004). Talent plays a role, but it is academic to discuss it with regards to the *pursuit* of expertise

Desire, practice and coaching are more important than talent in developing expert teachers (Starkes et al, 1996). Support is therefore essential in becoming an expert and expertise can therefore be seen as a change in agency over time (Glaser, 1996).

The 10 years it takes to become an expert *could* be shortened if effective coaching and deliberate practice occur.

Context is also key. A study of expert teachers in America suggests that experts usually excel because they have strong knowledge of a “child’s personality, typical behaviour and past performance”.

Interestingly, when these experts were taken out of their own classrooms and given a class they had never met, they struggled as this sort of pupil knowledge obviously wasn’t generalisable (Berliner, 2004).

This pupil knowledge is contextually bound and without their usual context, experts struggled.

In this study, the discerning factors between novice and experts were “degree of challenge that the curriculum offered, the teachers’ ability for deep representations of the subject matter, and the teachers’ skilfulness in monitoring and providing feedback to his/her students.”

Pupils who had expert teachers in the study were found to have an understanding that was “more integrated, more coherent, and at a high level of abstraction than understanding achieved by other students”.

Glaser (1996) outlines three stages of expertise - “externally supported, transitional and self-regulatory”

As novices, we need to be ‘externally supported’ because our behaviour is rational and inflexible. At this stage, real-world experience is our priority and we deem it more important than what we are told about teaching.

The ‘transitional’ stage happens a couple years in after we have built up our knowledge of teaching through personal experience – we start to relate back to previous events to guide our practice.

We begin to see patterns and similarities between classroom events, another characteristic of the expert teacher (Berliner, 2004)

This practical knowledge is built up without the help of others. We learn to understand the rules, describe events, but we cannot yet predict/determine what will happen in each event.

The ‘self-regulatory’ stage – we now know what to attend to and what is not important. Errors in timing, assessment etc are far less common. We know when to move on, when to spend more time on a topic etc because we understand particular contexts and particular students.

We can study what expert teachers do and train ourselves to turn these behaviours into habit. Yet, at the same time, we must acknowledge that it is not individual elements of practice that experts do particularly well, but their ability to orchestrate all elements in harmony.

For those interested, the study carried out by the National Board of Professional Teacher Standards (NBPTS, 1994) listed these 13 features of teacher expertise:

•better use of knowledge;
•extensive pedagogical content knowledge, including deep representations of subject matter knowledge;
•better problem-solving strategies;
•better adaptation and modification of goals for diverse learners and better skills for improvisation;

•better decision making;
•more challenging objectives;
•better classroom climate;
•better perception of classroom events and better ability to read the cues from students;
•greater sensitivity to context;

•better monitoring of learning and providing feedback to students;
•more frequent testing of hypotheses;
•greater respect for students; and
•display of more passion for teaching.

End.

If you have any literature you think I should read or any comments, let me know!