Think about one of the best teachers you ever had; someone who taught you well and taught you much. What kinds of words would you use to describe this teacher? What was it that made your teacher so influential, so inspiring, so teacherly? How knowledgeable was he or she, and what kind of knowledge was it anyway?

Such questions are simple to ask, and might even stir up satisfying memories of learning, but in the field of teacher expertise development they are rather difficult to answer in precise terms. Yet scholars have been working hard for decades (perhaps centuries) to answer them because excellent, highly-skilled teachers are such a precious social commodity. And experts are often scarce.

I recently came upon a worthwhile article discussing the knowledge differences between teachers at different stages of development, Novice and Competent Teachers’ Knowledge Differences. As the title betrays, the authors contrasted teachers in the early stages of their teaching career – the novices – to those who had honed their expertise to a comfortable level of competency. Rather than focus on the features and skills of that rare species, the truly expert teacher, the authors identified and clarified the characteristics of teachers considered competent in their craft.  Following Berliner’s (1986, 1988, 1994) five-stage theory of teacher expertise development, they made it a point to concentrate on characteristics of the competency stage. They made sure the teachers they interviewed did not demonstrate the tell-tale marks of proficiency or expertise, which they described as “(a) the use of intuition over logic in making pedagogical decisions, and (b) extensive and sophisticated knowledge of the subject matter taught”(Schempp, Tan, Manross, & Fincher, 1998, p.13).  While acknowledging the value of Berliner’s (1986, 1994) model of teacher expertise development, they underlined the need for research to explicate the distinctive characteristics of teachers in the process of developing and becoming experts.

So what kind of distinctions did they expose? The most pronounced cognitive differences concerned the teachers’ perception of student learning difficulties, their knowledge conceptions, and their reflective practices. (Schempp et al., 1998). Here is a brief summary:

Competent teachers seemed to be keen lifelong, or at least career-long, learners. They showed a commitment to augmenting and refining their content knowledge as well as their teaching techniques. “A consistent theme among the competent teachers in this study was the search for new ideas: fresh methods for teaching familiar subject matter, dealing with classroom management, assessing student progress and discovering new content”(Schempp et al., 1998, p. 18).

So, circling back to the original question about a great teacher you’ve had: do the characteristics described ring true? Does your teacher display all the characteristics of competency? Or would you say that s/he goes beyond and approaches the threshold of proficient and expert qualities?

References

Berliner, D. (1986). In pursuit of the expert pedagogue, Educational Researcher, 15, 5-13

Berliner, D. (1994). Expertise: the wonder of exemplary performances. In J. Mangieri & C. Block (Eds.), Creating powerful thinking in teachers and students: diverse perspectives. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College.

Schempp, P., Tan, S., Manross, D., & Fincher, M. (1998). Differences in novice and competent teachers’ knowledge. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice, 4:1, 9-19.

A literature review sometimes seems comparable to a treasure hunt. You scour journal databases, bibliographies, unpublished dissertations, and sometimes old, dusty non-digitalized books looking for the valuable gems that will inform – and sometimes transform –  your research.  Finding such jewels inspires a silent sense of joy (for me at least).  I’ve found a number of oldies-but-goodies published in the late 80s, and there is one in particular which seemed particularly insightful as I prepare for my pilot study beginning the third week in March.  I’ll be testing out how suitable eye trackers are for the classroom teaching context and trying to determine how well different eye tracking systems (stationary or mobile) capture teachers' visual perception and attention.  I’m also hoping to get a handle on how well eye tracking data combines with other methods to expose the covert cognitive and perceptual processes of teachers.

The technological capabilities of eye trackers, and the software associated with them, is fairly impressive (for examples have a look here http://www.smivision.com/ ).  So I was surprised when I dug op the article, Expert-Novice Differences in Perceiving and Processing Visual Classroom Information (Carter et al., 1988). The researchers examined differences in teachers’ information processing using…photographic slides. Had they used videos I wouldn’t have batted an eye, but slides struck me as a medium from another era; indeed, from another century. At the same time, they clearly served as an effective tool for examining differences in expert, novice, or postulant teachers’ information processing. As claimed in the abstract, “Results suggested that experts, novices, and postulants differed with respect to their abilities to perceive and interpret classroom information”.  I’d like to recap some of these differences, mainly for the sake of keeping them clear in my mind while I’m wondering what kinds of results and expert-novice differences I might detect with a mobile and a stationary eye tracker.

It is worth describing the tasks that Carter et al. devised to assess differences amongst participants regarding immediate perceptions, interpretations, memory, action-situation connections, and visual attendance in terms of managerial and instructional concerns. Task 1 was the “Quick Look” task, in which participants were shown three slides of a math or science classroom environment for only one second, and then wrote down what they saw. Task 2 was the “Look Again” task, in which participants were shown additional slides for three seconds and wrote down what they had seen. Then they were shown the slide a second and third time and were asked to revise or add newly noticed information to their notes.  Task 3 was called “Tell Me a Story”, and involved viewing a sequence of about 50 slides for about five seconds each.  Participants were asked to reconstruct and narrate the sequence of events and to answer questions about particular events or students that had been shown in the slides. The fourth and final task, “Stop and Talk to Me about Management and Instruction”, repeated the same procedure as task 3, but allowed the participants to stop the slide viewing whenever they chose so that they could discuss slides or slide sequences which they considered significant for purposes of classroom management or instruction.

Below is a summation of their findings about how expert teachers processed the slides:

References

Carter, K., Cushing, K., Sabers, D., Stein, P., & Berliner, D. (1988). Expert-Novice Differences in Perceiving and Processing Visual Classroom Information. Journal of Teacher Education. 39 (3), 25-31.

For once I'm going to push aside the academic papers and just draw upon my own experiences from teaching.  So this post will have less to do with research and will instead attempt to unroll a personal reflection of sorts.  This little shake-up offers me the double advantage of helping me resurrect the deeper motivations which compelled me to engage in research aimed at improving teacher expertise in the first place, and to provide a more 'real-life' account of why teaching and the role of practical knowledge matters to me beyond the boundaries of scholarly concerns and the inevitable research that goes hand in hand with them.

When I was working with ESL (English as a Second Language) students in East Harlem (New York City) I often reminded them that focusing on the 5 Ws [who, what, when, where, why] , which were represented on a large hand on a prominent wall in the classroom,  was a handy tool for summarizing many types of information. It was a simple prompt to kick start tasks like writing personal narratives about significant moments from the students’ lives, it was a quick and easy way to write up a book review and draw out the key themes for other prospective readers in the class, and it was an effective strategy to draft an outline for the essays written for the grueling standardized tests that consumed so much of their valuable school time.  The other key question word - the how - might even seem a lot more manageable once the Ws were out of the way.  The suggestion delivered results in the classroom, so we'll see how well it works here.
 
Who:  Although there are many faces which slowly come into focus when I close my eyes and conjure up memories of my first year in the NYC public schools, there are some which are more prominent than others. Sometimes it seems a bit of a miracle that I remember anything at all from that first year. It was  arguably the most difficult, demanding, intense, and overwhelming year of my life, and many of the most confusing and challenging moments still remain buried in the blackness of my inability to process all that took place, both personally and professionally.  Rabi is one student whom I remember instantly. Though he doesn't fit the profile of a typical student success story, he was one of the students that kept me from drowning in this difficult year. His ability to help me find my way as a teacher had nothing to do with what a studious or charming student he way, as neither of these words are apt as a description. It had everything to do with the challenges he presented: his underdeveloped literacy skills, his lack of consistent schooling, his unwillingness to accept his need for language support since he could 'talk good English already',  his indiscreet gang affiliation, and his frequent need for attention that often led to disruptions and fights (in and outside of the classroom).

What: Last week I was riding my bike home, pushing hard against the wind and trying to ignore the cold winter rain pelting my unprotected face. As a distraction I was trying to work out the lyrics to a Boudewijn de Groot song, something about hoe sterk is de eenzame fietser, but I couldn’t get past the first line. So my mind flitted through a few random thoughts and settled on an imaginary slide show envisioning the current lives of some of my former students. I still have a loose level of contact with a few through facebook, those which remained my students for consecutive years. But the 8th graders who left our building after my first year of teaching had dispersed to futures still unknown to me. A few had passed by to say hi several times after their departure because they lived in the neighborhood around the school and often had brothers, sisters, or cousins in my class. I was grateful that Rabi had been one of them. He had even given me a photo so I wouldn’t forget him. Eventually his adolescent interests found other distractions, and I only saw him once by coincidence on the street when I was biking to my grad classes over at TC (Teachers College). That was the image that returned: his un-tressed fro held back by a headband whose color I couldn’t remember (but which I had wondered about whether or not it was a gang signifier); his slightly slimmer body from a recent growth spurt; his huge smile that helped me believe things were going all right for him and that he might even be happy to see me. Where was he now? Had he fulfilled the statistical prophecy and dropped-out of school, or had he defied the predictions? Was he still in New York, or had a gone back to the Dominican Republic? Did he have a job, a wife, his own child? And would I ever find a way to thank him for what he had taught me?

When: Before the school year began, the teacher training problem I was in begin fast and furious, and we had to cover a lot of ground at an intense pace. There were hundreds of hours of in-school observations to fulfill, loads of instructional theories to comprehend, school placement contracts (a.k.a. a teaching position) to secure, practical experience to accrue via summer school, coursework to take part in, and the NYCDOE (Department of Education) paperwork to manage, all in the first 3 ½ months. So many hoops to jump through.  Yet none of this was nearly as daunting as the reality that would sink in when I stood before the students in September. In the beginning, Rabi was one of the students who seemed to darken my efforts to shine in the classroom. He was tardy, disrespectful in class, openly aggressive towards other kids, never deterred by the threat of detention, and in so many ways an unsavory student. I blamed him for a lot of my classroom management failures, because even veteran teachers seemed to have a hard time reaching him and reigning in his wayward disruptiveness. My accomplished Assistant Principal, who had often been quite informative, didn’t know what to do with him either. He wasn’t even allowed in the office most of the time because he harassed her, the secretary, other students, and often was a catalyst for further chaos. When I consulted her about the Rabi-dilemma, I was told, in exasperation, to just figure it out. The key to the solution of this so-called Rabi-dilemma, I eventually found out, had nothing to do with classroom management theories, and was not something that could be gleaned from other teachers’ experiences. It had to do with building a bond, and then trust, and then figuring out how to meet each other half-way so that everyone (meaning me as the teacher, my students, and Rabi in particular) could learn to ‘do school’ together. The bond began in an abrupt moment I had not bargained for, sometime during the second month of my first year of public school teaching.

Where (and a bit more of ‘what’): Violence was a given at my school, so hall fights were definitely not a rare phenomenon. I had been advised – mostly for legal reasons and as a self-protective measure – not to interfere in fights between students, wherever and whenever I saw them. This counsel came from my teacher training, from my fellow teachers, and even from the students themselves. It was hard advice to swallow since these were just young kids (falling somewhere between the ages of 10 and 15). Still, I tried. I focused on teaching, improving my lessons, accomplishing learning goals, ignoring jaunts and belligerence, and let a lot of unacceptable behavior slide since I didn’t know what to do about it anyway.  But I could not manage to keep this distance when I saw, through the small window of my closed classroom door, a four-student fight explode in the hallway. Actually, I heard it before I saw it, and though I was in the middle of the lesson, I instinctively went to the door to see what kind of bomb had gone off. Three kids, all in uniform (but perhaps displaying gang colors I was too green to detect), were pounding on one student. Something flared-up within me, and against the seasoned advice from all sides, I lunged towards the gnarled mess of students and started pulling off the attackers. Behind me my students had rushed to the door for a better view of the excitement. Because I was so focused on dodging the fists that were still striking, my hearing seemed suspended and the whole moment was just a mechanical, visual process of breaking up a fight.

I don’t remember what or if I said anything to the attackers. The whole scene was so out of place that they were startled by my intervention, and stood there stunned as they tried to make sense of what/who had stopped the fight. The smallest and most frenzied fighter spoke first. Omitting the cursing and uncomplimentary language he actually used, he said something along the lines of, “How dare you, teacher lady. You’re extremely lucky I didn’t bash you in the face. You’re so short I thought you were another student, and I was about to mess you up.” I don’t remember how I responded. I was completely shocked that his response was to be angry with me for interfering with his business, and that the only reason it seemed to matter that I was a teacher was because he knew there would be more serious consequences if he had hit a teacher. I think I mumbled something ineffective, explained that I was trying to teach, that it wasn’t really a fair fight with a ratio of 3 to 1, and that he was lucky I didn’t know his name. At that point, he and his crew were already wandering back to wherever they had come from. The only one remaining was the student still on the ground. By coincidence, he turned out to be one of my students. He told me I didn’t need to help him, as if it was a bit shameful that I had intervened. I dropped the subject, asked him why he was late, and we walked into the classroom together, a few steps behind the crowd that had been at the door. He went and sat next to Rabi, who was exuding a rare air of quiet, puzzled contemplation.

Why: When the class ended and the students moved on, Rabi lingered. He said he wanted to tell me something. I said I wasn’t in the mood. Internally I was thinking about the incident report I should fill out, and was trying to figure out what kind of school I actually worked in, feeling a bit like I had lived out a scene in a bad movie. In spite of my disinterest, he kept speaking. Ultimately I became moved by this effort of his, the fact that he took the time to elucidate something which he vaguely realized I couldn’t understand. He told me that the kid in the hall was right, that I was lucky he hadn’t socked me in the face. He explained, in his logic, why I should never get involved in fights at school, how I could never know if these kids had weapons, or if they would be waiting for me after school because they thought I would get them into trouble. Basically, he schooled me. He gave me insight into a perspective that none of my previous life experience could have provided. He grounded me in the realities of the community in which I had chosen to teach. He shared his insider knowledge, his practical knowledge, teaching me how to get by, to get a feel for how I might be perceived by the students in the school, and to figure out how to evade further endangerment. Why he had decided to offer up this advice and contribute to my own education, I can not say.  

What I can say is that his contribution not only opened my eyes wider to the realities of urban education, it helped me to see, in an episodic and lived way, that some, maybe all, of my students possessed a wealth of knowledge that might only rarely express itself in an academic framework. Nonetheless, this was their knowledge, and it had a value far more profound than I had realized. This value translated to survival for them in many situations, but it was also extended useful knowledge for me, and necessary insights for me to teach them in ways that might be meaningful. It opened up spaces for us to meet more as people sharing the same space – the same school context – in spite of the distance between our lives and our backgrounds. This knowledge also became the glue that bound me to Rabi, and his sharing of this knowledge became the moment that my image of him shifted. He stopped being a classroom management nightmare and started being an agent of change, a student who needed a different kind of attention and required a different approach to teaching, because he came to class with a different set of knowledge and abilities, one which I had been too stubborn and ignorant to acknowledge before. Those few minutes of conversation together, the life lesson that Rabi spontaneously espoused, merged into many, many hours spent together after school. Often this was spent doing the classwork and the homework that Rabi didn’t manage to do on his own, or working on the story he was writing for our class project, but sometimes it was just spent chatting, showing me things on the internet or displaying his sketches, many times drawing other students into the exchange.   

It was also a moment where I passed beyond the edges of the theories of pedagogy and internalized beliefs based on my own experience as a student or a teacher-in-training. I would have to learn how to leave some of these presumptions behind because they did not align with the reality of my work. It was the moment when I stepped onto the bridge that would bring me closer to the shores of teaching experience, the place where I would begin to build and re-build, sometimes slowly and painfully, the practical knowledge that would inform and improve my teaching expertise. As I close this reflection and remember the moment now as a turning point in how I perceived my students, I owe a lot to of credit to Rabi. Through Rabi I finally began to understand all this talk I had heard about bonding with your students and developing honest, human relationships with them, friendships even. Through him I gained a precious insight into the worth and currency of the practical knowledge of students, which through time and experience morphs into the indispensable treasure of teachers’ practical knowledge.
 

Recently an article entitled Differences in Teachers’ Comments on Classroom Events as Indicators of Their Professional Development (Krull et al., 2007) fell into my lap. The abstract promised some insight into the different ways beginner and expert teachers perceive and evaluate classroom events.  After a quick scan at the references, the researcher in me was sufficiently intrigued: there were a number of sources which matched those I already considered valuable in my own mental list of essential authors, as well as few captivating titles for additional reading. This kindled the hope that perhaps this article would not only delve into the same themes I’ve been grappling with, but also that it might go through and beyond these themes, and ultimately illuminate the shadowy sections of my own research path. This was, admittedly, a naïve hope. Definitive, clear-cut answers to complex teacher research questions seem akin to mythological creatures: fantasizing about them may have its appeal, but letting your imagination (or desperation) convince you that they are real only places your conceptualizations in an even more precarious position. That said, the paper still held some reaffirming observations in terms of how it considered previous research on teacher expertise development, and also in its reiteration of research propositions put forth by other authors.

It also tipped me off to Kagan’s (1992) characterization of the four major dimensions of change among teachers as they progress through the professional development stages described by Berliner (2001). These were listed as:

1.    The way a teacher monitors classroom events, moving towards an unconscious recognition of common patterns;
2.    The degree of conscious efforts involved in classroom performance, moving towards fluid, flexible, automated routines;
3.    The degree to which performance is guided by personal experience and the degree to which the teacher can predict events accurately;
4.    The teacher's focus, as student work and academic tasks become the major organizing framework of instruction.         
                                                                                                (Krull, 2007, excerpted from Kagan, 1992, p.160-161)

    
Useful as Kagan’s depiction of teachers’ professional change may be, I agree with Krull et al.’s assessment that the value is restricted to its explanatory function, and still leaves a lot to be desired if one intends to evaluate the level of teacher professionalization in more precise, practical terms. Or  if one has reams of transcript to code in an effort to determine substantial differences in the ways expert and novice teachers perceive, assess, describe, and cognitively structure significant aspects of classroom management, and that same someone wants their interpretations to be not merely interesting, but sufficiently reliable.

Krull et al. described the process through which they increased the reliability of their categorization procedures, noting that considering and comparing teachers’ comments in terms of instructional events helped raise their inter-rater reliability.  They ultimately settled on Gagné’s (1985) model of instructional events as a suitable structure for framing and analyzing teacher comments, but they also built upon and adapted these tried-and-true events in order to account for comments concerned with classroom atmosphere, organization, and management. Here’s what their categories ultimately looked like:

                                (Excerpted from Krull et al, 2007, p.1044)

Based on my own interests in how teachers at different stages of professional development perceive and represent aspects of teaching deemed significant for classroom management, my hopeful heart fluttered at the inclusion of the organization and management category. Unfortunately, the flutter faded quickly. I suppose this was a predictable outcome, since instructional events lend themselves to a broader construction than a specific, intentional focus on classroom management would. Depending on how one chooses to define it, classroom management could be considered a comprehensive task interwoven into nearly all aspects of instruction, or it could be listed as a mere sub-category subsumed by a broader theme. Krull’s article seems to have chosen the latter.

After additional rounds of constant comparison, the “organization and management of general class activities” did not pass muster for deeper discussion, since the differences were not calculated as reaching statistical significance. Krull and his colleagues did, however, zoom in on the “general teaching strategy and classroom atmosphere” category. But their discussion was limited to quantifying the relevant idea units in this category [Novices: 11; Experts: 59] and breaking the idea units into additional sub-categories [For novices: general management of instruction & motivating and praising students/ For experts: comments characterizing the teacher, the pupil and the class, general management of instruction, and general atmosphere of the classroom].  My critical heart found their analysis unfulfilling and unfinished, and took little comfort in their statement that:

 “The other category of comments that revealed significant differences between novice and expert teachers is related to general teaching strategy and classroom atmosphere, which have enormous impacts on teaching a class in the long run in terms of classroom management and learning motivation.”  (Krull et al, 2007, p.1048)

Though I was wishing (and hoping) that their research findings might allow for something more vigorous than an aside in their discussion section, it was gratifying to see that they had drawn a clear link between the teaching strategies applied, the classroom climate that follows as a result, and the implications for learning.   They even went on to point out that the “lack of context specific and strategic knowledge” (p.1049) in novices is a major limiting factor when it comes to implementing preventative strategies that would avoid, or at least mitigate, classroom management issues.

As I read through and reflected on their conclusions my sedated heart stirred again, vaguely analogous to the fabled phoenix that resurrects itself only after it has been reduced to ashes (in a fire set ablaze through self-intention). As I’d been sifting through stacks of articles linking theories of teacher expertise development, classroom management, and teacher knowledge, I’d already latched onto the idea of teachers’ practical knowledge playing a crucial role in explaining the difference in knowledge structures applied by experts versus those (insufficiently) applied by not only novices, but also advanced beginner and competent teachers. Krull et al. drew similar links in their article, specifying in their conclusion that:

“(T)he student teachers’ sensitivity towards those factors playing critical roles in successful classroom management and in creating a positive atmosphere in the class should be addressed in lesson analyzes…Special attention should be given to promoting student teachers’ practical knowledge and awareness of factors shaping the classroom atmosphere and students’ learning motivation, as the development of these capabilities typically takes years.”   (Krull et al., 2007, p.1049)

Though the direction of my research path still has a great number of areas and concepts which could still use some illumination, the hopes with which I picked up this article had not been as empty as I thought. The authors and I seem to agree on the prominent role of classroom management as an invaluable skill for teachers at the beginning of their career. Likewise, promoting the practical knowledge development essential to the development of this skill (and other skills) is presented as an imperative for improving teacher training, and thus the expertise development of teachers, which advances equally precious gains in student learning.  These conclusions of theirs, reflected in my own speculations, restored a glimmer of hope -- enough light to forge ahead through further research.

References

Berliner, D. (2004). Describing the Behavior and Documenting the Accomplishments of Expert Teachers. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 24(3), 200-214.

Gagné, R.M. (1985). The conditions of learning (4th ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Kagan, D. (1992). Professional growth among preservice and beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 62(2), 129-169.

Krull, E., Oras, K., & Sisask, S. (2007). Differences in teachers' comments on classroom events as indicators of their professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23, 1038-1050.

The question has been raised time and time again: what knowledge is essential for ‘good’ teaching? Educational research into teacher expertise development would be a lot less of a jumble if we could just put our finger on what this knowledge consists of, how it is integrated, and how its development and dissemination can be effectively supported.  Though these issues have been deeply discussed in educational research since the 20^th century, and though there is a capacious collection of literature as a consequence, the simplicity of collective accord remains elusive.

Perhaps it is the nature of knowledge itself which has created the complicated knot making teachers knowledge so difficult to untangle? Philosophers busying themselves with defining knowledge, describing its acquisition, and determining whether and how we can know something in the first place have been struggling for centuries. Attempting to analyze and explain Knowledge with a capital  ‘K’ means lumbering through the unsettled, seemingly indeterminable  territory of Truth and Belief, not to mention their Justification.  Epistemological concerns are neither trite nor transparent and they are tough knots to untangle. Yet they are deeply fascinating concepts which apply broadly to human existence, likewise to teacher expertise development, and there is a long legacy of cross-disciplinary writings  which try to straighten out, or at least separate the strings, of the knowledge knot in spite of its esoteric character. 

Thus, we turn to Gary Fenstermacher and his work on knowledge conceptions in the domain of teacher research. In his work The Knower and the Known: The Nature of Knowledge in Research on Teaching (1994) he extensively examined the epistemological aspects of teacher research programs , which he specified as:

“(T)hose features of the research that assert or imply notions about the nature of knowledge: what form it takes, how it is justified, how it is differentiated from such related concepts as belief and opinion, and how it figures into different conceptions of science and human reasoning.” (Fenstermacher, 1994, p.4)

In his effort to smooth out the knots, he addressed multiple strands of teacher knowledge. Presumably after much contemplation and tribulation, he settled on the following four questions in his examination:

1. What is known about effective teaching?
2. What do teachers know?
3. What knowledge is essential for teaching?
4. Who produces knowledge about teaching?

What he contends –  along with the varied perspectives and concepts put forth in the research he sifted through –  is that gaining insight into the knowledge deemed essential to effective teaching is definitely not a straightforward question-and-answer effort. Untangling the essential knowledge is a process which must account for a number of other knowledge-related questions into teachers and teacher education.  What is considered indispensible depends on who you ask, how they view teaching, learning and Knowledge itself, and especially the nature of their research programs and inquiries into the types of knowledge entangled within expert teaching.

In his approach to the concept of teacher knowledge he pointed out, rather significantly but not uniquely, that there are distinct types of knowledge (he defined type  as “discrete epistemological categories”) constituting the teacher knowledge knot.  There is a divisive line drawn between TK/F and TK/P;  teacher knowledge: formal and teacher knowledge : practical.  Reduced and simplified, knowledge of  teaching and knowledge of how to teach.  Or framed in terms of his questions, what is known about teaching theoretically and what is known by teachers experientially. These TK/F and TK/P categories are meant to be rather broad, and they encompass the ecclectic mix of terminology dispersed throughout the literature. Fenstermacher mentions "strategic knowledge, propositional knowledge, relational knowledge, craft knowledge, local knowledge, case knowledge, situated knowledge, tacit knowledge, personal knowledge, and so forth" (p.6) as examples, but additional terms such as procedural knowledge, professional knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, explicit knowledge, episodic knowledge, conceptual knowledge, encoded knowledge, and scores of others could easily be added. The point is, it's a long list.

In a later post I'll explore the distinction between TK/F and TK/P in greater depth. For now, it's enough to acknowledge that the knowledge knot is a thick and complicated one; just as with a real knot, the untangling requires slow, deliberate effort and concentration.

References

Fenstermacher, G. (1994). The Knower and the known: The nature of knowledge in research on teaching. Review of Research on Education, 20, 3-56.