Borderland

What is it that makes a teacher great?

An article from The Age, Learning from the Best attempts to answer that question. The article references an Australian government-funded study, In Teachers’ Hands: Effective Teaching Practices in The Early Years of Schooling (2005).

Given equal preparation and background knowledge, what are the qualities of a teacher who is able to engage students in deep and meaningful ways?

Outstanding teachers

• draw on a wide repertoire of teaching practices;
• explain activities more clearly,
• have deeper subject knowledge,
• maintain a high level of intellectual challenge for their students;
• have fun.

From the list of great-teacher-attributes, I can see that a combination of training, high expectations, and enthusiasm seem to be the common denominators of effective teaching. The training provides the repertoire of practices and the deep subject knowledge that are necessary for a teacher to respond to a multitude of situations that require technical expertise. A high level of intellectual challenge is necessary to maintain student interest and satisfaction with the work they’re asked to do, and the ‘fun’ part…needs no justification.

William Louden, the lead researcher for In Teachers’ Hands, commented on the findings of the study.

“The most important finding of our study was that it is the teaching practices employed in the implementation of an activity, rather than the activity itself, that distinguishes between the more effective and less effective teacher.”

It is worth noting that these findings contradict efforts in the US to “teacher-proof” classroom lessons with scripted literacy programs.

Coincidentally, Wesley Fryer posted an article about a presentation by Dr. David Berliner on the effects of NCLB. I was curious to find out more about Berliner, who had so much ammunition to fire at the standardized testing movement. I found a few links to more work published by Berliner.

Developing expertise

In The Wonder of Exemplary Performances (1994), Berliner described expertise-how it develops, and what it looks like in practice.

In the domains in which they are acquiring their abilities, developing experts learn more from experience than do the rest of us….What is learned by the expert appears to be linked better to other knowledge….It also appears that such knowledge is more easily retrievable…and more transferable to new situations than is most other kinds of knowledge….In the domain in which they have acquired their unique skills, experts usually perform appropriately and effortlessly.

From studies of expertise, Berliner compiled a list of the attributes of experts, which I condense and abridge:

1. Expertise develops over a long period of time.
2. Development of expertise is not steady or continuous.
3. Expert knowledge is structured for use.
4. Experts recognize meaningful patterns.
5. Experts are flexible.
6. Experts are much more “top down processors.” Novices are misled by ambiguity and are more likely to be “bottom up” processors.
7. Experts may start to solve a problem slower than a novice, but overall they are faster problem solvers.
8. Experts develop self-regulatory processes as they engage in their activities.

Berliner noted that the research from which these propositions were derived analyzed the performance of experts in various fields, but neglected to include teachers. Berliner therefore extended the study to include the development of pedagogical knowledge, using a commonsense psychological framework that follows the development of expertise through stages of novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert levels of performance. He developed a set of propositions based on the above-mentioned general set, to describe the job performance of expert teachers.

Propositions concerning teaching and expertise

• Expert teaching is heavily contextualized. Expert teachers depend on knowing their students, and have a thorough understanding of the subject matter being taught.
• Expert teachers use routines to accomplish some of their teaching goals. For instance expert teachers were observed to introduce lessons in a way that was generalizable across many performances:
  1. They stated the objective of the activity.
  2. They gave clear directions about what the students would be doing.
  3. They created a positive environment, finding ways to increase student involvement.
• Expert teachers are sensitive to task requirements and social constraints when solving problems. Expert teachers demonstrate concern for the ability, experience, and background of their students when planning their lessons, and they respond frequently to social cues provided by students during instructional periods.
• Expert teachers are opportunistic and flexible. We’ve all heard of the “teachable moment,” and great teachers know how to seize and capitalize on those moments.
• Experts have rich models for situations that allow them to understand problems in a more nuanced way. They describe problems creatively, and provide solutions based on sound teaching principles to problems they encounter. Expert understandings permit teachers to conduct a high quality task analysis of curricula and to estimate the difficulty of material their students are expected to learn.
• Experts have fast and accurate pattern recognition. The ability to “read” a classroom and make appropriate inferences appears to be highly dependent on experience, which is often discounted in favor of “enthusiasm” when comparing new teachers with veterans.
• Experts bring rich stores of knowledge to solving the problems they encounter.

Expertise in teaching can only be taught by example. Since developing expertise as a teacher is known to take about 5 years, school districts that offer mentoring and apprenticeship programs for new teachers may sooner realize the benefits to be derived from helping them to develop these skills rather than leaving them to “figure it out” on their own. We should always remember the most important “skill”…

Have fun!

“…I know the particulars of what I know only in an instrumental manner and am focally quite ignorant of them; so that I may say that I know these matters even though I cannot tell clearly, or hardly at all, what it is that I know.” (Polanyi, 1974, p. 88)