In my last post, Why Scripts are Beneficial for Novice Teachers, I argued that because worked examples are the ideal scaffold to support learning for a novice student, worked examples of lessons are the best scaffolds to support the learning for novice teachers.

By worked examples of lessons, I mean providing the teacher with the exact instructions, and the exact representations, that they can use to move student understanding forwards. In its most direct form, this will be a script of what the teacher should say (instruction), inclusive of exactly what they should show students (representations) and when and how to show them.

In this post, I want to add nuance to our understanding of the terms ‘expert’ vs. ‘novice’ so that we can better generalise this finding about the importance and the value of teaching scripts.

Teachers: Who Is a Novice? Who Is an Expert?

A reasonable but incorrect interpretation of the terms ‘novice’ and ‘expert’ when it comes to teaching and scripted lessons would be to assume that it relates to years of teaching experience. The longer the teacher has been teaching, the more expert they are.

This would be a mistaken interpretation for at least two reasons, one obvious, one less so.

The obvious reason is that all teachers with 20 years experience are not of the same of expertise level. Some teachers have incredibly supportive environments, fantastic PD opportunities, and dispositions or guidance that prompt them to continuously test, learn, and adapt throughout these careers, accelerating their expertise. Other teachers may have unsupportive environments, little or misguiding PD opportunities, and/or attitudes and mindsets that restrict their learning and development.

The less obvious reason, and the much more crucial one for today’s argument, is that, when it comes to Cognitive Load Theory, when we are talking about ‘novice’ or ‘expert’, we are not talking about a generalised trait. It is not accurate for us to categorically refer to a specific teacher as ‘expert’ or ‘novice’. Instead, teachers (like students) are expert or novice in relation to a specific target skill.

For example, a teacher who has taught year 12 Mathematics for 20 years is unlikely to know anything about how to teach a struggling Year 2 students to read.

In fact, a teacher who has taught Year 12, or even Year 7 English for 20 years may still not know how to teach a struggling Year 2 student to read.

In fact, a teacher who has taught Year 2 for 20 years still may not know how to teach a struggling Year 2 student to read. If that teacher hasn’t had the support and guidance required to develop these skills and knowledge (or has been misguided with respect to it, which has been incredibly widespread), and they simply haven’t accessed the required quality examples of how to teach reading to such a student, it’s near to impossible for them to have acquired this knowledge.

This brings us to the answer to our headline question: When we talk of an ‘expert teacher’, we most usefully do so in relation to their skills and knowledge to teach students a specific concept. Any given teacher may be completely expert at teaching one thing, but a complete novice at another. All expertise is content (and often context) dependent.

Here I am speaking primarily about what we could call ‘curriculum expertise’, which is the expertise required to develop students’ understanding of a specific curriculum dot point. I will touch upon pedagogical expertise at the end of this post.

Why it’s important to think of expertise as content-dependent

There are three key reasons why seeing expertise as content-dependent.

The first is that it promotes a mindset of collaboration. If we stop categorising ourselves as generally ‘expert’ or ‘novice’ teacher, we realise that the teacher of four decades could very easily learn something of high value from their prac teacher on placement. If that prac teacher just happens to have come across better information or models on how to teach mixed numbers than has the veteran, the veteran can clearly learn from them in respect to this skill.

The second benefit of seeing expertise as content dependent is that it empowers us to make the most of highly scaffolded and even scripted programs. Even a teacher who has taken a keen interest in, and has taught Year 3 maths for a number of decades, is unlikely to be aware of the/an optimum way to teach every mathematical concept covered in Year 3. This means that, regardless of their level of experience, they will always be closer to the novice end of the spectrum when it comes to teaching some concepts. In such cases, they can learn a lot from a clear worked example.

The third benefit of seeing expertise as content dependent is that it takes the pressure off. It sends a clear message that, ‘Just because you have been teaching high school maths, or Year 2, or whatever it may be for over a decade, you’re not expected to know how to teach all of it perfectly.’ This promotes the kind of mindset of continual growth and development required for any teacher to continuously move from novice, to more expert, across the often overwhelming multitude of teaching spectrums that they’re required to master.

Generalised Curriculum vs. Generalised Pedagogical Teacher Expertise

In this post I have made a strong case for the fact that expertise is content-dependent and there is no such thing as generalised expertise when it comes to teaching. However, as with most things, there is of course a little more grey to it than that.

There are a number of vastly more transferable skills and knowledge within teaching and, when we consider these, it probably is fair to categorise teachers along some sort of more generalised novice-expert spectrum.

The first is knowledge of how learning happens. Once a teacher deeply understands the most generalised principles of learning, especially those outlined within Cognitive Load Theory (worked example effect, expertise-reversal effect, redundancy, split-attention effect, modality effect, etc, etc), as well as more generalised Science of Learning principles such as spacing, retrieval, and interleaving, they are exceptionally well placed to apply those principles to the teaching of any topic at and year level. We could call these principles of curriculum design(and they go deeper than CLT too as outlined by Engelmann in his Theory of Instruction).

The second type of more generalisable and transferable teacher knowledge is what we could refer to as knowledge of the learning cycle. It is crucial for teachers to understand that learning occurs not both in time but perhaps more importantly over time. And they must see themselves as not only the deliverers of knowledge but also as experimenters with respect to it. ALL effective teachers follow a cycle of instruct→test→adapt, in which they provide some instruction, check for student understanding, then adapt instruction based upon what students have and haven’t successfully performed. Seeing teaching as this somewhat scientific process of instruct→test→adapt is the basis of ‘responsive teaching’, and is perhaps the most important principle for teachers to grasp. This is because, from this principle, all other principles - such as the principles of curriculum design above - can be derived (it would just take a long time if you were trying to derive them all yourself!)

A third type of generalisable or transferable teacher knowledge relates to the habits of effective classroom direction. Managing student attention, student movement, instructions to students, and much more requires multiple sets of coordinated actions from the teacher that can be enormously cognitively demanding for those in our profession. Learning what to do at these crucial instructional points, and building the habits to do so automatically and effectively, is truly a lifetime journey.

Note: Supporting the development of this more generalised pedagogical teacher expertise is the focus of much teacher PD, including the work that I do at Steplab.

In Sum

Whilst there are some generalised skills and knowledge that teachers can gain that will help them to be more ‘expert’ in a generalised sense, when it comes to expertise in relation to delivery of key learning outcomes, it is best for us to consider teacher expertise as content-dependent. When it comes to teaching concepts to students, no teacher is wholly expert, or wholly novice, they can only be categorised as such in relation to particular learning outcomes.

Because of this, all teachers can learn from lesson scripts. Novices will benefit greatly from the structure that a script provides, experts will adjust and adapt in line with their greater knowledge of both concepts, and their own students.

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This post is part of a series on the role of scripts in high quality teaching. Subscribe to receive all future posts

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