Developing Teacher Expertise

Abstract

What is an expert? Many will likely answer that it is a person in any field who performs his or her job in a seemingly effortless manner so much so that it looks automatic and comes from all the years of experience performing this particular job. In the field of education some teachers have been regarded as experts only because of their years of experience in a classroom, but as Tsui (2003) has noted, the number of years of teaching experience does not necessarily translate into expertise. Indeed Woods (1996) has cautioned although “one teacher may have had ten years of experience, another may have had one year’s experience ten times” (Woods, 1996: 270). Within the field of TESOL teacher expertise is still a very under-researched topic (Rodríguez and McKay, 2010). This final chapter then explores all the data presented so far in relation to teacher expertise. I first looked at the literature on teacher expertise and then scanned all the data in an attempt to outline specific characteristics of ESL teacher expertise exhibited by the three teachers. First I discuss what teacher expertise is, then outline the specific characteristics of teacher expertise found in the data, and finally recommend how ESL teachers in mid-career can seek to become expert ESL teachers.KeywordsPast ExperienceTeaching ExperienceLesson PlanningCritical ReflectionReflective PracticeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.