Expert teachers

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Expert teachers

• And innovative uses of technology

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Structure of the talk

• Learning how to teach novice to expert
• Expert teachers and policy towards them
• Naming expert teachers, defining the role
• Characteristics of teacher expertise

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Structure of the talk

• The technology context
• The research project and findings
• Digi-teachers a useful term?
• An English model
• Implications for policy and practice
• Conclusions

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Expert teachers and innovative uses of technology

• Andy Goodwyn,
• Professor of Education,
• The Institute of Education ,
• The University of Reading.
• Bulmershe Court Reading
• RG6 1HY, UK.
• a.c.goodwyn_at_reading.ac.uk

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Reflective practice

• The experience in reflective teaching is that you
  must plunge into the doing, and try to educate
  yourself before you know what it is youre trying
  to learn.
• --Donald Schön (1987)1

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Schön

• But that plunge is full of loss because, if
  youve taken that plunge yourself, you know the
  experience.  You feel vulnerable you feel you
  dont know what youre doing you feel out of
  control you feel incompetent you feel that
  youve lost confidence.

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Schön

• And that is the environment in which you swim
  around, trying to design or trying to teach or
  trying to do whatever the hell it is youre
  trying to learn to do until you get to the place
  where you can understand what people are saying
  to you.

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Donald Schön

• And you become angry and you become defensive. Or
  defensiveness, at any rate, becomes a very
  present danger--"a clear and present danger." And
  whats extraordinary is that, for the same
  students, for example, after six months or a
  year, they were understanding perfectly well what
  was being said.

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Dreyfus model

• Novice
• Advanced Beginner
• Competent
• Proficient
• Expert

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Expert teachers and policy

• Professionalisation
• Parity with other professions
• Recognition and retention in the classroom
• Professional development of other teachers
  mentoring/coaching

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Expert teachers and policy

• Assessment and/or accreditation to provide
  credibility
• Specific standards
• New role

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Expert teachers and policy

• Lack of subsequent career development
• Lack of longitudinal evidence
• Lack of research
• Political vulnerability
• Minority category e.g. England 4,4500 i.e. 1 in
  500
• USA 67,000 i.e. 3

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Expert teachers?

• The Advanced Skills Teacher
• The Excellent Teacher
• The Highly Accomplished teacher
• The Chartered teacher, Scotland and Wales N.B.
  Potentially ALL teachers

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Expert teachers?

• The Chartered Teacher England, subject
  associations e.g. Science, Geography
• Master teacher
• Leading teacher
• The Distinguished teacher

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Expert teaching Hatties characteristics

• Deep understanding of teaching and learning
• Problem solving approach
• Anticipate, plan and improvise
• Excellent decision makers prioritise decisions

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Expert teaching Hatties characteristics

• Optimal classroom climate for learning
• Recognise the multidimensional nature of the
  classroom
• They recognise that teaching is context dependent
  and highly situated

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Expert teaching Hatties characteristics

• Constantly monitoring student progress and
  providing valuable feedback
• Testing hypotheses i.e. is this working?
• More automatic i.e. they keep plenty of mental
  space available

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Expert teaching Hatties characteristics

• High respect for all students
• Passionate about teaching and learning
• Highly motivating building students
  self-regulation, self-efficacy, self-esteem

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Expert teaching Hatties characteristics

• Set appropriate but challenging goals and tasks
• Positively impact on achievement
• Enhance surface and deep learning

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Hattie

• John Hattie
• Teachers make a difference
• October 2003

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Mckinsey report 2007

• The quality of an education system is only as
  good as its teachers
• The only way to improve outcomes is to improve
  instruction
• High quality instruction should reach every child

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Harnessing technology?

• Huge investment in hardware and software in
  schools
• Endless attempts to link numbers of computers to
  achievement mostly test/exam scores
• Little evidence of impact

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Harnessing technology?

• Very modest investment in teacher development
• Over expectation of pre-service training
• Teacher self help model

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Harnessing technology?

• Evidence of increasing USE of technology
• Extensive but not intensive
• Extensive but not effective

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Harnessing technology?

• Dreyfus argues that expertise in one broad domain
  means sub areas can be at any level.
• Experienced teachers can be novices with ICT
• They recognise that teaching is context
  dependent and highly situated

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Harnessing technology?

• Expert teaching categories in England unlikely to
  reveal ICT expertise
• Might exclude newer teachers who are rapidly
  becoming expert with ICT

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The Research

• Funded by BECTA Harnessing Technology theme
• Focus on very good teachers who ALSO used ICT
  very effectively
• Peer nomination methodology

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The Research

• Data was collected using a mixed methods design
  through survey, interview and in-depth case
  studies.
• The teachers included were first identified as
  outstanding teachers and then as being effective
  users of ICT.

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The Research

• This categorisation is unique to this study. The
  study uses selected sampling based on peer
  identification.
• Using the Universitys strong partnership network
  of schools, an introductory letter requesting
  nominations was sent to all Primary and Secondary
  Head Teachers and 35 schools replied with a total
  of 93 nominations.

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The Research

• From these 93 nominations, 54 teachers agreed to
  be included in the study and are drawn from a
  mixed range of attaining schools and subject
  specialism
• In total, 26 were teachers from Primary and
  Infant schools and 28 from Secondary schools. In
  terms of gender, 24 participants were males and
  30 female.

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The Research

• Data was collected via semi-structured telephone
  interviews
• Biographical information was collected via survey
  questionnaire
• Data was then organised in terms of similarities
  in patterns and themes, with a particular
  emphasis on teachers motivations and attitudes
  to developing their practice.

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The Research

• From the 54 interviews, 13 teachers were then
  selected for an in depth follow up case study. Of
  these, 6 were male and 7 female.
• Case studies incorporated a filmed classroom
  observation as well as two short semi-structured
  interviews one before and one after the lesson
  observation

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The Research

• Participants were selected on the basis that they
  most closely resembled the characteristics of an
  expert teacher, as identified in the literature,
  as well as their ability to use a range of
  technology in innovative ways in the classroom

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Research Findings

• Digi-teachers is used to offer a simple and
  distinctive term to cover this emergent group of
  expert practitioners.
• These teachers fit well with current views of
  expert teaching but they are not usually ICT
  specialists.

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Research Findings

• A distinguishing feature is their capacity to
  integrate ICT into everyday teaching.
• Digi-teachers recognize that ICT both engages and
  motivates students and therefore has benefits for
  classroom management and learning.
• For them technology is just one more element in
  their expert domain of teaching, yet is a medium
  that allows for innovation.

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Research Findings

• Digi-teachers are not determined by their age,
  although the newer generations of teachers have
  more such teachers.
• Nor are they characterised by the attractions of
  gadgetry or the whizz bang factor of ICT per se

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Research Findings

• Digi-teachers are concerned chiefly with the
  learning of their students
• have a strong motivation to connect with their
  students lives using the mediums that students
  recognize and engage with.
• Digi-teachers have normalized the use of
  digital and other technologies in the classroom

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Research Findings

• They use every kind of technology
• The vast majority of these expert teachers are
  self-taught.
• The importance of in-service support and training
  as well as opportunities to experiment through
  trial and error.

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Research Findings

• Digi-teachers are expert teachers, not
  technicians
• Developing ICT expertise requires a high level of
  reliability and technical support, so as to
  minimise problems when they occur

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Research Findings

• Teaching is almost never about ICT itself
• Teaching is often done by the students
• Students contribute content ideas much more
  consistently

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Research Findings

• Teachers principally adapt
• e.g. The sports teacher who started to use his
  digital images of his students originally taken
  to help them to show to their parents to
  illustrate his parental meetings

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An English model

• Student centred
• Personal interest as well I recognise myself in
  the students of today sites like YouTube, which
  are influential in producing innovation and
  creativity

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An English model

• Student centred
• using technologies for example that students
  are using and understand, keeping up to date with
  the way that young people are interacting in the
  world

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An English model

• Personal
• know the individuals you teach inside and
  outside the school have personal conversations
  ICT is part of their personal world

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An English model

• Inclusive
• they can come and write on the whiteboard, its
  a sense of real belonging, they are really
  involved in the lesson, its now a two way thing
  and we learn together --- its important for them
  to see we learn together

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An English model

• Affective pedagogy
• Enjoyable Exciting
• Motivating Delightful
• Enthralling Never boring
• Vivid Enthusiastic

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Implications for policy

• The workforce contains a number of very good
  teachers who are effective and enthusiastic users
  of ICT Digi-teachers, the proportion of those
  teachers within the profession is not known
• more such teachers should be identified and their
  innovative practice should be disseminated.

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Implications for policy

• Identifying and supporting those teachers would
  lead to many benefits to students and other
  teachers
• Digi-teachers make more difference than the
  number of computers in a school, therefore
  measuring the number of such teachers per school
  would be valuable.

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Implications for policy

• Most of these teachers are self taught they
  provide excellent role models for their
  colleagues and should have more recognition.
• Digi-teachers should be given release time to
  further improve their practice and to help others.

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Implications for policy

• Many teachers would value Teaching Assistants who
  are very competent with ICT Teaching Assistants
  need more ICT training
• Most teachers do not know the ICT capabilities of
  their Teaching Assistants there is a need to
  audit the ICT competence of Teaching Assistants.

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Implications for policy

• Policy should shift towards developing and
  supporting teacher expertise rather than an
  obsession with technology itself
• Research focussing on defining expert use, rather
  than extensive use.

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Implications for policy

• Research producing more qualitative insights e.g.
  case studies of Digi- teachers.
• At least some research being more longitudinal in
  perspective.

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Conclusions

• Digi-teachers is a useful term and a broad
  category.
• Characterised by expertise that incorporates and
  adapts technology
• The teachers have autonomously evolved their
  practice
• Essentially they are motivated by the lifeworlds
  of their students

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Conclusions

• Better to invest as much in Digi-teachers as in
  machines
• Innovative practice is created in individual
  classrooms
• Formal Expert teacher categories should not
  exclude other forms of developing expertise.