One of the reasons education doesn't progress much is that expertise in teaching is so difficult to ascertain.
Also, expertise at teaching young children doesn't always correlate well with abilitly to persuade adults of one's expertise. The best elementary teacher I've observed did not come across particularly well to adult audiences.
Coaching--which is a form of teaching--does the best job of making expertise visible by making student accomplishment visible. But even in coaching, expertise doesn't guarantee success because students remain free agents who vary in talent. A great coach can still have less than successful seasons.
Still, no measure other than student performance should carry much weight. Certainly not grades at college or acquisition of workshop and course credits. Knowledge of the discipline to be taught is important, of course. Its absence makes almost certain the teacher won't be able to teach well, but its presence guarantees not much at all.
It seems to me that there are many things that contribute to being an expert teacher and one need not have all of them to be an expert teacher. Teaching in the end is a communicative art. No matter how much you scientize it or formalize it, you still have a plurality of very different minds to address in bodies of your students. Because humans differ in capacities and talents, to be a good teacher requires an appreciation of the way we construct and prefer certain talents and how to get those to manifest to the best ability that students are capable of manifesting. However, that is not necessarily a 'measurable' quality. is it? I can teach you many things, but as aristotle says the only way to learn to live a good life, is live it. To get students to live well, given their differences and similarities, in their culture will always be an art. So what is an expert teacher.... I'm inclined to say that an expert teacher is one that manages to change someone's life for the better, but given that you cannot know what their life would have been otherwise... we can't know.
Scientize? Oh well.
I've got a question as well.
How did we get too "how" without going through "why"?
Alternatively, if you could supply a "why", might that help point the way to the best "how"?
I'm just being silly of course. There are certain questions that mustn't be asked in the field of education, "why" being among them. To do so would be to commit professional suicide as anyone with a modicum of perceptivity would know so the question is edited out of the psyche. If you don't think about it you won't be tempted to ask it.
Not exactly an atmosphere conducive to the free exchange of ideas or illumination of the truth of course but understandable if you consider that an iconoclast is someone who drives an American car.
I think the best definition of an "expert" I've seen comes from the sport of alpine skiing: An expert is someone who can handle the full range of possible conditions that one might encounter with grace and speed, while maintaining their own personal style and expression.
Lots of people can make it look good when the conditions are just right. It takes an expert to be able to adapt and excel under widely ranging and quickly changing circumstances. It's not just being really good at one thing and focusing on that strength. Being an expert means you have developed many different strengths, each requiring dedication and hard work, and then are able to use whatever technique is appropriate for the situation.
Interesting question. Check out this chapter, How Experts Differ from Novices in How People Learn, published by the National Research Council. I read it a while ago, but you have inspired me to revisit it.
http://books.nap.edu/html/howpeo...eople1/
ch2.html
Here's some "linky love":
http://www.letsgetitright.org/
bl...vs_novices.html
Thanks Michelle. That is exactly the kind of thing we've been discussing in class. Great article. I may post again on this and link to it out front.
So now, how do we build expertise in new teachers? Or students who will become teachers?
Observation, observation, observation. Trainee teachers should be in a variety of classrooms across the grade bands as much as possible so that they're exposed to different styles and methods. In their classes they should be watching video of teachers both good and bad. They should have rubrics, like those that Dwayne Baker uses with his Powerful Teaching and Learning workshops, so that they can evaluate those videos and decide what elements they can take into their own practice and what should be avoided at all costs.
Once they get into the classroom I'm all about the mentoring programs, but the mentor should be someone who is completely released from their classroom duties and can thus spend the time observing and conferencing with the newbie to help them refine their practice. The mentor should also have the authority to push the new teacher into the training that they need, whether it's Love and Logic for management or UbD for lesson planning, and the district should provide the time and resources for that teacher to fix their flaws.
Chess expertise rests largely on a huge store of well-organized domain-specific knowledge. Experts are significantly better than novices at remembering board positions from real games, yet both perform equally when the pieces are placed randomly.
Anyone interested in chess can pick up a book that describes various ways to counter the Caro-Kann or French or whatever. Experts know this information in the same way an expert violinist knows how to play a piece. With this knowledge safely tucked away in long-term memory, it no longer intrudes heavily on their thinking, such that they can find new moves, strategies, or tactics, or focus their attention on the nuances of the music, the emotion, the tone of individual notes, etc.
The first step in making expert teachers is building up, and making accessible, a store of knowledge about all the individual components of teaching, such that best practices can emerge.
It seems like a daunting task, but there are what, trillions of different combinations in any chess game?
Yes, Yes, Yes. Mr. Person has struck gold with his comment! Combine this with the long term observation and mentoring outlined TheRain and you have the recipe.
Take a look at any of the "professions" Jenny and I have routinely pointed to a leared professions, medicine, law, and others. You have a schooling part in which the professional amasses the STRUCTURE of the compiled knowledge as well as the basics of that knowledge. Afterward there is a period of Observation and mentoring in which the gaps of knowledge are filled in. The result at the end of many years of practice is an expertise, built upon a systematic domain specific knowledge base coupled with actual work and feedback from other experienced professionals.
To me, what seems to be lacking is both a well-organized domain knowledge on teaching-not subject matter knowledge, but knowledge about teaching as a skill/art. At the same time, there is not the long term mentoring/feedback/evaluative process in teaching present in other professions.
To build on Mr. Person's and Matt's comments, teaching expertise is predicated upon student success. To become an expert teacher requires that students actually learn. Presently, a teacher can build up some expertise teaching the top 25% of the student population because these kids tend to learn what is taught using present pedagogy. But the lack of success with the bottom 75% is preventing teachers from developing any expertise teaching these kinds of kids. So, teachers aren't yet building up the kind of domain knowledge Mr. Person writes about and colloboration and mentoring won't yet help, as Matt describes, since kids aren't successfully learning in the first place. For teachers to become experts they need to learn how to develop expertise in their students first. Note the irony.
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