There is a great deal of literature available to enable school leaders and teachers to better understand what expert teaching looks like or how this develops over time. To know what expert teachers need, we need to first consider what expert teachers need to know and what expert teachers do. This ensures that alongside an explicit sharing of knowledge, school leaders can then also consider what support and development can look like to empower staff to be invested in the process of development in and of itself.
This set of assumptions is not exhaustive, but helps us to consider where best to place our energy when supporting teachers to become experts in a manageable, supportive and professionally respectful way.
What do expert teachers need to know?
Learning can be defined as “a lasting change in students’ capabilities or understanding” (Department for Education, 2020). This concept encourages us to view learning through the lens of memory.
If we are to say that memory forms the thought architecture that enables learning to take place, this helps us to understand what expert teachers need to know and grapple with.
Learning and memory
We can be fairly sure, and it is fairly undisputed that:
– we can only learn what we attend to;
– we can only consciously attend to a handful of stimuli at any given time;
– many things compete for our attention and we, and our pupils, face a constant battle in directing our focus to what we deem to be the most important thing at any given moment.
As soon as we are introduced to something less familiar, we employ our long term memory to search out information or experience that might make it more familiar. This also means that the very process of integration makes the act of misconceiving unpredictable and difficult to entirely mitigate against. This is just one of the many inevitabilities that cannot be completely eradicated when teaching pupils about new ideas. And this is vital: expert teachers do not just recognise how children learn, but acknowledge the significant limitations that the act of learning can place upon teaching.
Once our attention is focused, there remains a series of threats to learning: our working memory’s limitations, or that a heavy cognitive load can result in fragility or inability to learn. It also carries significant implications for the integration of new knowledge with existing knowledge.
Performance and learning
Expert teachers understand the superficiality of performance and that it is unhelpful and inaccurate in defining true learning. Therefore, regularly returning to important knowledge, skills and concepts are necessary and the harder we think about something, the more likely we are to remember and learn it. Learning is largely invisible, and whilst we have ways of inferring learning, expert teachers will know that when students apply knowledge, it is the only way that students reach a deep, fluent understanding of content.
We also need to understand the false proxies of performance in the classroom, and the detrimental impact that this can have on meaningful and genuine learning over time. Soderstrom & Bjork (2015) outline that performance relates to teachers observing students’ behaviours or responses straight after learning something- checking for understanding is helpful, but checking for learning is problematic. Learning is a process that takes time and effort, and so learning can only really be determined over a period of time, when pupils revisit knowledge and apply it at a later point.
Therefore, subject specificity is essential: those who are expert in subject know how to construct sequences of learning in a meaningful way, and are less likely to lean on performative measures when attempting to make inferences.
Developing expert mental models
The development of mental models for students are important, but equally, these models enable expert teachers to distinguish between emulation and application in their own teaching. In the same way that students develop models in a specific domain, teachers develop mental models of how to teach specific subject content: the purpose of design rather than ‘this task or this task,’ learning rather than doing, and the nuance that whilst there are principles and best bets for teaching and learning, there are no right or wrong tasks in the classroom, but only ones that provided a stronger or less strong rationale that is conducive to learning.
To exemplify this further, expert teachers know that task or technique is a superficial evaluation, and that the rationale of a task is what holds more weight. It is not about a mindmap or a bullet point list for students to capture useful success criteria, but the model from the teacher to ensure the success criteria is accurate or conducive to the next episode of learning. It is less about whether teachers use a ‘hands up’ or ‘no hands up’ approach to questioning, and more about how many students are thinking hard, and how the teacher determines that they have grasped the foundational milestone required to then introduce new knowledge. There is something here in the way novice teachers use these frameworks as a support to develop mental models for effective learning, but they do not result in effective learning in isolation.
Subject specificity
Domain specific knowledge is critical for learning. As mentioned, the subject content should inform the pedagogy, and learning is left to an increased sense of fragility if generic pedagogical understanding is applied to subject teaching. Whilst frameworks are useful in reducing the cognitive load for novice teachers, such frameworks must be handled with nuance for teachers to develop their knowledge and expertise. Tricot & Sweller (2013) outline that ‘instructional design theories and processes are transformed’ when domain-specific knowledge is understood.
Therefore, in the same way that students need knowledge to think critically about that knowledge and how to evaluate whether they deem it worthy, noble or useful, teachers need knowledge to inform the enactment of a curriculum effectively. It is one of many reasons why the current recruitment and retention landscape carries such heavy implications for education: those teachers who have taught a full curriculum cycle have stronger mental models, and therefore know not just an extensive amount of knowledge within the domain itself, but also how that domain ‘maps’ over time- where the strengths and limitations are of teaching something too soon, or too fleetingly.
As an English teacher, I am not developing skills that would be highly useful in other domains as a result. In the same way, I cannot be taught or apply ‘critical thinking’ to my teaching delivery: without the substance of the lesson, I’m speaking about something entirely in the abstract. Equally, students need subject-specific knowledge of what they are evaluating. Students will not be able to evaluate the most important cause of the French Revolution without subject-specific knowledge of the sequence of events that led to and that took place at this time.
What do expert teachers know? McCrea (2018) outlines that this means expert teachers:
- Plan with focus: Students will need to focus hard on the important knowledge, skills and concepts they need to learn. This means teachers need to plan tasks that focus students on these knowledge, skills and concepts.
- Start with what students know: Students understand new ideas in relation to what they already know. This means teachers’ planning will, therefore, need to start with what students know, the anticipated endpoint and build from this prior knowledge.
- Consider cognitive load: Students’ working memories may be easily overloaded with new ideas. This means teachers will need to consider the cognitive load they are placing on students and plan to break down new material when introducing it.
- Develop fluency: Students need to return to important content and practise applying it if they are to understand it deeply and develop fluency. This means teachers need to plan to revisit important content and plan plenty of time for students to practise applying it.
- Scaffold as a way to match expertise to support: Once students have a better mental model in an area, they will need less support from the teacher. This means teachers need to continually check what students understand and reduce or remove support accordingly, matching support to students’ levels of expertise. (McCrea, 2018).
This enables us to consider how some of these features translate to the tangible behaviours that we see in the classroom when watching experts teach. How might we capture the principles of expert teaching so that there is a balance between the intangible and the everyday, without significant distortion of the theory?
What do expert teachers do?
- Demonstrate strong knowledge of their subject, the curriculum cycle as a whole and knowing the significance of ‘teaching for later learning’ – teach for learning, not performance
- Plan with their subject content and where students misunderstand this as the primary foci
- Retrieve prior knowledge that is likely to be effectively integrated with current learning
- Ensure high participation from students to think hard and demonstrate understanding
- Construct and deliver expositions that hold clarity and fidelity to subject knowledge
- Exemplify excellence for students, knowing students rarely apply knowledge without exemplification first
- Incorporate curriculum time for students to practice and receive precise feedback that moves learning forward, knowing the significance of ‘feedback for later learning.’
Yet so far, we have focused on the what of expert teaching, and how it might look when captured in a classroom, but less so on how we support all teachers to develop as experts. This is crucial of course and the development of relational trust, cultivating the professional curiosity to become an expert, and the supportive professional environment are key enablers of the ideas covered so far.Teachers who do not feel supported to experiment or develop their expertise will not want to or choose to do so. It’s that simple.
What do expert teachers need?
Clarity around subject-informed, high-quality teaching
Whatever we determine as quality will become the very priority in regard to teaching excellence, so school leaders should be prudent in the language and formats used to communicate this. Expert teachers hold clarity around content knowledge (subject matter), general pedagogical knowledge (tools to teach) and pedagogical content knowledge (knowing how to package subject matter for teaching delivery).
(Shulman, 1987).
If we adopt tighter parameters for what determines excellence or seek out generic or superficial ways to indicate quality, this is more likely to lead to superficial, performative improvement over the longer term, or a tendency to apply universal rules to subjects that require very distinct approaches to teaching content that remains faithful to discipline.
We can too often find this in over-codified mapping tools that, in a bid to simplify the act of learning, inadvertently reduce teaching to a number of naive processes that start with pedagogy, and then attempt to mould around the subject as an afterthought. For example, all independent practice must be pre-cursored with a modelled example, and all examples are centrally created without contextualisation at teacher level. Or perhaps, that retrieval tasks have five questions, and less focus is given to the knowledge retrieved, why it is retrieved and how a response to a high-leverage question is exemplified.
Too loose, and this will be at risk of becoming misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied in the classroom, but again, are more difficult for less experienced teachers to make sense of ahead of experiencing a full curriculum cycle. Holding clarity to a principle of teaching over teaching as flow chart helps us to avoid such mutations of what we know about learning. To exemplify, a sharing of key concepts that underpin a curriculum, with little to no exemplification of how such concepts are taught explicitly. Or, to speak of checking for understanding, without a reference to the evidence base for effective formative assessment. For instance, the difference between:
Retrieval practice should feature in all lessons
to
This new information requires pupils to have a secure understanding of relevant prior learning related to this concept or idea
Or
We should use explicit instruction with novice learners
to
Where students are likely to misinterpret this concept, consider the language and prior knowledge that will mitigate against misconception.
Or
Questioning should involve all pupils
to
Questioning enables some pupils to share their understanding, but we recognise the limitations when a task does not enable participation for all.
Systems and practice that acknowledge caveats
Where developmental practice or quality assurance can sometimes fall short of developing the quality of teaching, typically the systems do not convey a shared language and conversational model that supports some of the aspects mentioned earlier.
Instructional coaching is highly effective in developing teachers, but only in environments where the culture ensures framing of such conversations is mutually understood by all parties. It’s why implementation of models that set out to develop teaching need to be so carefully considered to safeguard and respect the expertise of the teacher on their trajectory of improvement, but also acknowledging our limitations when setting out systems that hope to infer the quality of teaching. When observing teaching in action, there are three caveats that school leaders might wish to be conscious of:
- curiosity of context
- respect of nuance
- limitations as a subject specialist
Entering someone else’s classroom will always be a privilege. For me, this requires a series of explicit behaviours that acknowledge this, but also support a developmental environment for me to be able to engage in a professional dialogue with the teacher where we are equally curious about how learning might be taking place.
I don’t know the context or what has come before or what the intended journey of learning might look like, and I should frame questions that help me to find out more about that. I need to respect the nuance and not make ready assumptions where decisions have been made to support specific students, or how perhaps knowledge gaps from previous teaching is being accounted for and may explain particular tasks, or design of delivery. As an English expert, I must be mindful of my lack of domain-specific knowledge in a classroom outside of my specialism, and be explicit in that when discussing the learning intentions with a Science teacher, for instance. Ensuring that policy and the day-to-day practice acknowledge such limitations also ensures that school and system leaders do not, unintentionally, convey their options as the gospel. I know I have made many a mistake in framing an opinion that should have been a question, and it led to the ‘next big thing’ of classroom practice, without realising the weight that my words had carried that day.
It takes us from:
Talk me through the intended learning of the lesson
to
I’m really keen to know more about the design of the task for that part of the lesson. Can you talk me through it and how it supported the learning?
or from
How would you usually explain that?
to
How secure has the students’ understanding of such-and-such idea been, during previous lessons?
or even just
How did you think the lesson went?
to
Thank you for having me in your lesson today.
Whilst the ‘what’ of the conversation is paramount in developing the mental models of teachers to be able to deliberate over the highest leverage methods of delivery in their classrooms, ensuring that that is a professionally curious, exciting undertaking is just as important. Most of all, that the respect for the teachers’ choices in any given moment is upheld as we look to learn from one another. I share this conversation between Ollie Lovell and Josh Goodrich as a staple for understanding the *how* of such conversations to ensure that they maintain a strong sense of relational trust and above all, avoid the parachuting notion that there is ever one way to teach. As a profession, it moves us away from rubrics that captures deficit language, and instead, builds on excellence and poses pertinent question about what we might think about next that could be conducive to pupils learning.
High quality models of excellence that takes a subject-first approach
Expert teaching comes from seeing expert teaching, and knowing what we know about transfer, it is interesting that we seem to sometimes disregard the need for the subject-specific lens here. Again, this will only continue to become problematic for schools if the number of our experienced teachers continues to deplete because seeing other teachers teach subject content in your subject discipline and then talking through it with them beforehand and/or afterwards is one of the most powerful side-by-side methods of professional development there is. It is only within that space that subject teaching will truly flourish and teachers are provided with the space and shared models to see the thought architecture behind the decisions that teachers have made. Some of this comes from the unique experiences of teaching content two, three, four times over; or indeed, taking a cohort from Year 7 to 11 and seeing the acquisition of knowledge and criticality that builds over time. Some of this comes from the professional trust that comes from middle leadership or teacher-teacher-focused professional development that, even with the strongest culture, can be hard to establish without the preconceptions of accountability or risk when making mistakes.
How do we enable the conditions for expert teaching?
A teacher will always tell you that time stands between them and their professional development, and we know that a culture to enable collaboration is also conducive to many of the aspects mentioned here. Trying to define such conditions need not feel nebulous or abstract. Giving time is a first important step, but parameters are required with suggestions and concrete examples of how to use this time productively (more on this here and here). Beyond this, subjects thrive best when they are able to share practice in a way that pays explicit attention to humility through action: the real-time decisions made in the moments of teaching and the ruminations around whether other decisions may have led to different outcomes. The collective curiosity at tearing out those hunches. The collegiate act of evaluating curriculum enactment together. Capturing and sharing excellent models as a timestamp to show what’s possible.
This is why it is a complex task to lead teaching. To do so is to provide a compelling base model that subject teams can quickly own to serve their subject disciplines. Some of the most powerful professional development I ever had was simply through the anticipatory or reflective conversations I had with experienced English teachers. Not just because they knew what it mean to be invested in the subject, but because the dynamic of those relationships was built upon professional trust and mutual respect. To deliberately set the time aside to enable all teachers that opportunity is incredibly important if we are to say that teaching is the greatest lever for student outcome and experience. It is through this shared understanding of the what and how, but with the grace that acknowledges both possibility and the hindrance of what-might, that the process of development feels truly and collectively exciting as an endeavour.
References
Barnett, S. M., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn?: A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological bulletin, 128(4), 612.
Department for Education. (2020). NPQ Leading Teaching Framework. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1125997/NPQ_Leading_Teaching_FINAL_Ref.pdf
https://www.ollielovell.com/joshgoodrich2/
Mccrea, P. (2018). Expert Teaching.
Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard
Educational Research, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.57.1.j463w79r56455411.
Soderstrom, N. C., & Bjork, R. A. (2015). Learning versus performance: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 176-199.
Tricot, A., & Sweller, J. (2014). Domain-specific knowledge and why teaching generic skills does not work. Educational psychology review, 26, 265-283.
Kat Howard 