In this article, Hannah Tyreman, Head of Online Learning and Community at the Chartered College of Teaching, explores teacher expertise.
New teachers are faced with an overwhelming amount of new information and experiences from day one in a school: colleagues’ advice, new knowledge, acronyms, processes, systems, teaching approaches and pupils. Decisions are made as many as 7 times a minute in some classrooms (Borko and Shavelson 1979) and Danielson (1996) estimates that a teacher makes more than 3,000 non-trivial decisions every day.Â
Expert teachers are able to direct their attention to whatever needs it the most because they have ‘intricate knowledge structures committed to memory, which allow them to approach problems differently to novices, solving problems more quickly and accurately’ (Fletcher-Wood 2018)
Length of service and experience in a classroom can often be mistaken for expertise, but without deliberate practice, regular feedback and expert input, we canâ
Join us or sign in now to view the rest of this page
You're viewing this site as a guest, which only allows you to view a limited amount of content.
To view this page and get access to all our resources, join the Chartered College of Teaching (it's £1 per year for trainee teachers and half price for ECTs) or log in if you're already a member.
