What makes an expert?

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the ResearchEd national conference in London. I have spent the last week mulling over the sessions I attended and writing up my notes. Any errors are most certainly my own but this is what I took away from my day. 

Peps’ book on memorable teaching – one of best out there

Peps Mccrea – Expert Teachers

I am a huge fan of Peps’ books so it wasn’t surprising to find the room for his session packed to the rafters. He was talking about the MA course he is setting up in Expert Teachers for the Institute of Teachers.

The Institute for Teachers are trying to answer three key questions:

1. What do teachers need to know?
2. How do we help them to develop this knowledge?
3. Who are the best people to help teachers?

The aim of this session was to consider how to identify expert teachers.

Impact perspective suggests that we can identify expert teachers by looking at what teachers achieve in terms of pupil outcomes in comparison to other teachers. Research from Hattie suggests that only 30% of a pupil’s progress is due directly to their teacher. Any impact is therefore probabilistic and not deterministic and this method is insufficient in determining expert teachers – too many confounding variables.

Mental model concept suggests that expert teachers can be identified by what they know and comes from the work of Anders Erikson (author of Peak) and David Berliner (see Learning About and Learning From Expert Teachers). This states that expert teachers like experts in other fields have a different way of seeing the world due to their experience and, more importantly, their deliberate practice and reflection (See the presentation from Becky Allen and Sam Sims). These mental models are based on overcoming common problems as the knowledge of how to act is already to hand.

These mental models form over three areas.

Path – Sequence subject knowledge. 

Pupil – a knowledge of how pupils best learn and respond at that particular age.

Pedagogy – a knowledge of teaching strategies. The “Folk Knowledge” of teaching supported by the science.

Affordances then suggests that expertise can be identified by what it allows expert teachers to do as a result of their expertise.

• Experts see the world differently to novices often defined by what they don’t see. They are more likely to filter out that which is not important/relevant to the problem.
• Experts are able to simulate the environment and problem and anticipate what will happen and start solving the problem before it occurs.
• Experts may take longer to reach a decision as they have more knowledge they are processing but their decision when it is reached is more likely to be correct.
• Experts conserve energy. A lot of what they do is done on autopilot as they can use previous examples as a guide.

Implications

These are the thoughts I took away from the session.

1. Expert teachers are not defined simply by their time practicing but by their deliberate practice. They need time to reflect on what they are doing and why.
2. Expert teachers are only experts in their narrow field. If you change the field they lose their expertise. It would be preferable for a teacher to specialise in a limited number of key stages/year groups and teachers changing place need support in regaining their expertise.
3. Experts learn differently from novices. Novices learn best from careful instruction and modelling. Experts learn better from problem solving. Treating an expert like a novice slows them down and reduces them to novices. Potential implication for how CPD is delivered.
4. Can we identify our expert teachers? If it doesn’t come simply with time spent teaching but with time + deliberate practice + reflection, are we cultivating our own expert teachers?

After the session I was pondering my own status. Am I an expert teacher? I think I am now but I don’t think I have been throughout my teaching career. I think the thing that has made the difference is the amount of time I spend thinking about teaching after reading and research. Teaching in the last few years has felt very different to teaching before this time. It is coming more “naturally” and different aspects of the job seem more interconnected. The only thing I can liken it to is a kind of flow state that wasn’t there before.

Something to ponder further.