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.

The Rare and “Arational” Expert Teacher

     Few would argue against the idea that excellent teachers, expert teachers, are an essential ingredient to any educational system striving to meet the challenges and demands of education in a globalized world. Even more so in the shadows cast by the shifts, instabilities, and unknowns that the current phase of globalization entails. Though the intrinsic value of high-quality, professional teaching may seem rather obvious, the concept of what an expert teacher is – what one does, how one performs, the outcomes one achieves – these aspects of an expert teacher are surprisingly complex, much like the act of teaching itself.

     There are a number of elements necessary to consider. We must consider the time and training, the accumulation of minutes, hours, and years required to develop teaching expertise. We must also account for the domain specificity of teaching knowledge, in terms of a particular content area, a particular school, a particular educational system. In other words, the particular context of the teaching knowledge. Not to mention the myriad personal and professional factors which account for the vast diversity in teachers’ behavior, knowledge, and decision making. This diversity is extensive, whether viewing the teacher as a unique individual or grouping teachers based on subject,  grade level, or professional development stage. As Berliner describes it, much of teacher knowledge is conditional upon the context in which, or for which, the knowledge has developed:

“ (A) continuing set of studies in and out of education informs us that expertise is quite often circumscribed. Knowledge, for the most part, is contextually bound. Cognitions are connected to actions and to places; they are situated. Thus, expert pedagogues, like experts in many other fields, are likely to excel in their own domains and particular contexts within that domain.” (Berliner, 2004, p. 203)

The domain specific nature of expertise, in teaching as with other domains, implies a progression from non-expert to expert, from someone who does not know to someone who knows on a profound, vast, and rather adaptable level. As part of an ongoing effort to distinguish the attributes of teaching expertise and to improve the growth of teaching expertise via teacher education (and professional development) programs, Berliner (2004) and colleagues adapted the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (H. L. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986) so that it accounts for the growth and progression particular to the development of teaching expertise.

     An interesting correspondence which emerges in this professional progression is the connection between experience and knowledge, particularly the practical knowledge that is acquired throughout the teaching career.   The idea of practical knowledge echoes much of what Shulman (1987) has referred to as the “wisdom of practice”.  It is the practical knowledge of teachers, the knowledge expanded through the accumulation of classroom practice, and the case knowledge it co-constructs, which carries them through the teaching day and the duration of their teaching career.

     In their summary of the most prominent features of teachers’ practical knowledge, Van Driel et al. (van Driel, Beijaard, & Verloop, 2001) described the following aspects:

1. It is action –oriented and often acquired without the direct help of others.
2. It is person-and-context bound (situated knowledge).
3. It is predominantly implicit, tacit knowledge, and therefore a challenge to articulate.
4. It is an integrated form of knowledge – a mélange of formal and informal, professional and everyday knowledge – and this process of integration is driven mainly by experience.
5. It is inevitably connected to teacher’s beliefs, which are the filters through which new knowledge is interpreted and organized.

     Keeping these features in mind, it may be worthwhile to take a look at how practical knowledge fits into the heuristic model of teacher development put forth by Berliner (2004). The role this knowledge plays in teachers’ professional development is of keen research interest.

Stages of Teachers Expertise Development

• Novice teachers have limited teaching skills, and this stage represents the foundation upon which teachers gain the experience that is so valuable to the construction of episodic and case knowledge. As teachers blend verbal (and non-verbal) knowledge with experience, they begin to recognize patterns in specific contexts as well as across contexts.
• Advanced Beginner teachers have some experience under their belt and the practical knowledge which feeds off this experience begins to influence their behavior, planning, and decision-making. Their understanding becomes more situation-specific, and both conditional and strategic knowledge influence the recognition and categorization of teaching context(s).
• Competent teachers have reached the point where they are both knowledgeable about and experienced with the responsibilities of teaching. They perform consciously, drawing from a fuller understanding of how to set priorities, make effective decisions, and discriminate between what must be attended to and what can be ignored or delayed.
• Proficient teachers exceed competent teachers in their ability to be fast, fluid, and flexible in their teaching performance. Their heightened aptitude for recognizing patterns and linking past, present, and future events relies on an intricate, intuitive body of knowledge, but their decision making remains rather rational and calculated.
• Expert teachers perform fluently, almost effortlessly floating through the complexities of teaching without much pause for contemplation, reflection, or deliberation unless something out of the ordinary spurs such mental effort. Since expert teachers rarely need to engage rationally, we could  consider them ‘arational’, having honed their practical knowledge to such an extent that is does not demand the conscious, intentional, rationalized application of their integratedknowledge. Practical knowledge is fused with the teaching performance adeptly, without any fuss or furrowed brows.   

     Detailing the specificities of in teachers’ practical knowledge, especially tracking this knowledge development alongside the progression through teachers’ professional development stages is a daunting, but intriguing, research task. 

References

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

Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind Over Machine. New York: Free Press.

Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1-23.

van Driel, J. H., Beijaard, D., & Verloop, N. (2001). Professional development and reform in science education: The role of teachers’ practical knowledge. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(2), 137-158.

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.