The Expert Teacher of English

Andrew Goodwyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415316958
• eBook ISBN: 9781136920158
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Expert Teacher of English is for all passionate teachers – both novice and expert - who aspire to become outstanding professionals. It considers what we mean by 'expert' and 'expertise', explores concepts that are vital to understanding what expertise in teaching is 'for', and discusses the characteristics of excellent teaching.

As increasing attention is being paid to the concept of the professional who can model excellent teaching and mentor and develop others, it provides a critical analysis of The Advanced Skills Teacher and the Excellent Teacher, as well as the Chartered Teacher in Scotland and the 'highly accomplished teacher' in the US. Ideas and issues considered include:

• The nature of English as a school subject
• What it means to be part of a profession
• Curriculum design, lesson planning and assessment
• Opportunities for technologies in the English classroom
• Working collaboratively with colleagues, mentoring and observation
• Continuing professional development and research

Drawing on the views, ideas and experiences of a group of skilful teachers, The Expert Teacher of English aims to stimulate personal and professional development, help you reflect on the concept of expertise, and support you as you develop as a highly accomplished teacher.

Chapter 1
The effective, extended professional

Polly, Interview 3: You know locally, as it were, your kids, the parents you talk to, they really do respect teachers and they surprise you with how much they appreciate you, but the media, politicians and so on, seem always to be trying to blame all kinds of things on school and teachers – it is a wonder we keep doing it!

The challenge of ‘status’ as a profession

Expertise does not exist in a vacuum. Although it may be argued that one might be expert at almost anything, cleaning your own teeth for example, being expert at any old thing is not the point. Expertise is associated with knowledge and skill, but also with value. Some expertise is highly valued and highly rewarded, other forms much less so, and those two elements, value and reward, exist in a creative tension. Before examining expertise per se, it is important to establish some fundamentals about effective teaching and teaching as a profession and about professions more generally. A concept such as expert teaching cannot be understood in a vacuum, and this book is addressed to readers who want to understand such expertise in its context. Comparisons with other forms of professional expertise are highly illuminating, and the term ‘professional’ is essential in defining the context in which teaching takes place. All kinds of teaching take place in many ‘amateur’ settings, and these are of interest; for example, in the performing arts, the concept of the master class will be discussed below. However, the kind of teaching we are focused upon has developed within a professionalised environment. The term teaching also needs some scrutiny, partly because it does not begin to capture the multiplicity of roles and functions that a teacher makes use of to create students’ actual learning. It also needs examination in relation to what is considered to be effective teaching before it is reasonable to examine what may be called expert teaching.

Being a ‘professional’

The teaching profession has had a long struggle with defining itself, especially in relation to other professions (Eraut 1994). Although it has always wished to be taken very seriously, especially by the public, it has often rather undermined its own status. ‘Everyone knows about teaching’ is an obvious point but all the more important to state, because of that loose generalisation. As every parent, politician and media commentator has experienced school, so they do have a genuine, if completely partial, knowledge base from which to pass opinions on teachers and teaching. This knowledge is chiefly of the ‘passenger in the car’ kind, that is passengers have been present while a great deal of driving has taken place, but have neither experienced the challenge of driving nor really observed it closely. It is also reasonable to say that everyone does some ‘teaching’, that is if you define teaching as helping someone else learn how to do something, either something new (learning to ride a bike) or improving (learning how to avoid falling off a bike).

Another highly defining element is that teachers themselves are also chiefly driven by intrinsic concerns for their students, rather than for themselves. They therefore share, with other ‘caring professions’, nursing, counselling, social work, etc., a tendency to describe what they do in terms of the benefits to students rather than the extraordinary difficulty of what they do in their daily work.

These factors combine at times to produce a curious but powerful paradox. There is a consensus, even among politicians, that teaching is really very important; at the same time, it is absolutely taken for granted and, especially given the passenger perspective, seen as really rather an easy job; the old cliché ‘think of the holidays’ is never far away. There is evidence (Goodwyn 2004a) that the last twenty years have seen some shift in this perspective, but it is not yet a fundamental one. The phrases ‘a top lawyer’ or ‘an expert financial adviser’ are commonplace and have an immediate credibility that ‘top teacher’ simply does not. What we actually call a ‘top teacher’ will be much discussed in this book. However, here we are initially concerned with the status of teaching and how that may, or may not, add kudos to expert teaching.

When teaching is compared with other well-established professions, it shares only some of their characteristics (Eraut 1994). Any term as general as ‘profession’ is bound to have many and often competing definitions and, given rapid change in the workplace, a necessarily evolving definition. For example, is a teaching assistant (TA) a straightforwardly professional role, or is it, as seems more currently accurate, a ‘paraprofessional role’ like a ‘paramedic’? Is a ‘higher level teaching assistant’ a more professional role than just a ‘TA’; the answer seems, almost certainly, ‘yes’. Finally, on this point, it may well be that the establishment of a well-defined paraprofessional role such as teaching assistant raises the status of teaching per se by implication. How do expert teachers, for example, work productively with another trained adult in the classroom, or might there be an implication that such teachers do not need assistance?

Given this book is aimed at teachers of English, then a short section devoted to the linguistic and semantic origin of the term professional is appropriate. There are many sources to draw on but any hefty dictionary will do (for example The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), and this analysis draws on a summary of some key points, not least because a key, sociological study of English teachers by Margaret Mathieson called English teachers back in the 1970s, The Preachers of Culture. This has a fundamental relevance because the origins of professional come from the medieval religious notion of ‘professing’, that is to profess the vows of religion, to ‘declare them’ (1510). The act of professing was crucial to being accepted into the community of the preferred religion and, by implication, a particular ‘order’. By the late 1500s, the term had already extended to mean both laying claim to some particular knowledge and expertise in a form of art or science and to teach some subject as a ‘professor’. Simultaneously, the idea of a profession as a vocation, a chosen calling, develops, tending still to be associated with religion but also including medicine, the law and the military.

In the late 1700s, the term ‘professional’ appears as pertaining to or being proper behaviour in relation to a chosen occupation, taking on the sense of having values and a moral code, not just about having knowledge but being concerned with how that knowledge is used. In the mid-nineteenth century, ‘professionalism’ had come to mean having a professional quality, the stamp of a profession and, by the 1880s, the distinction in sport emerges between amateur and professional, bringing in the inevitable question of financial reward. Therefore, what can be considered to be the ideological underpinnings of the concept of a professional were established by the end of the nineteenth century. For example, the first use of the term ‘unprofessional’ meaning contravening what is expected of a professional is in 1899.

In the twentieth century, the notion of the professional has become absolutely established as a normative role within a highly structured economy and within defined characteristics. However, these defining features (see below) must be seen as contested and contestable. For example, with the idea of professional status may come accountability, but how much is a true professional autonomous, and how much accountable, and if so, to whom? This latter point has been a particular issue for teachers, especially highly effective ones, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Therefore, although particular professions will set out lists of skills, as does teaching, these can fragment into microscopic items that become almost pedantry. All professions then are skilled, and they debate, principally internally, exactly what the ‘skill set’ is at any one time. The professions are best understood, as Michael Eraut sums it up, ‘as an occupational ideology’ (Eraut 1994: 227). In his excellent discussion of Developing a Knowledge Base within a Client-centred Orientation, he argues that the debate about professional characteristics has become sterile and that ‘professionalization can then be viewed as a strategy for gaining status and privileges in accordance with that ideology – the three central features of the ideology of professionalism are a specialist knowledge base, autonomy and service’ (ibid.: 227). But, Eraut points out, teaching struggles to be a full profession, especially as politics exerts increasing influence down to classroom level and because of the ever increasing numbers of stakeholders who demand influence. Teachers are perhaps confused because, as Eraut puts it, ‘Are they meant to be serving the pupils, the parents, the local community, the school district, or the whole nation?’ (ibid.: 228).

In a ‘top tier’ profession such as medicine or law, there is clearly a very strong element of client service and a very distinctive knowledge base, so distinctive in fact that most ‘lay people’ define themselves as completely lacking that knowledge. As discussed above, that is not quite the case with teaching (Goodwyn 2004b); lay people definitely believe they can express a view and should be entitled to do so. On these grounds, ‘old’ professions such as medicine (still doctors rather than nurses although that status is changing in an interesting way), law, architecture, etc., are ‘top’. Teaching has enough of these characteristics to be almost a top tier profession.

Although Eraut defines the professions as principally having in common an ideological stance, it is reasonable just to note what are relatively common features associated with professional status. For example, the knowledge base usually comes from an initial period of graduate-level study in the key subject or a related one. In top professions, there is then a period of further study, possibly vocational, very often postgraduate. At some point, the novice actually enters the profession, is, as it were, through the gate. As the individual professional becomes established, this tends to be through developing a specialism, which demands further study and ongoing upskilling (continuing professional development or CPD). Such specialists then have students and novices of their own who they induct into the profession. Most such professions also have a strong, sometimes direct relationship with a discipline studied in higher education; this academic subject (say mathematics) may have a very long history. Education as a discipline still struggles to hold its own in the academy, not least because populist views cluster around it, but also because teachers themselves frequently undermine it as a subject and its ‘theories’. Much of this view comes from the experience of the academic study of education during initial teacher training (ITT); other professions insist on much more post-initial training studies.

Professions are also marked by their very particular language and technical vocabulary. They have a regulatory body of some kind and the capacity to ‘practise’ is dependent on belonging to that body. As well as having codes of practice set down in great detail, they tend to have ways of behaving that are much less defined but are the ‘culture’ of that group. ‘Never smile until Christmas’ is not a technical term, it is more of a folklore phrase, but it carries meaning within the professional group that are teachers. Teachers do not wear uniforms (compare nurses) or particular gowns (compare barristers), but each setting tends to have a strong dress code, although it may not be written down.

Teaching has most of the markers of a top profession; it has, for example, the appropriate level of esteemed qualification (it is almost entirely a graduate-level group), an appropriate initial training period with a strong gatekeeping function and certification of practice that can be revoked. It does now require teachers to maintain their own professional development (see the Standards section of the Department for Children, Families and Schools website), although the lack of any real system persists; teacher in-service development is haphazard at best. There is a well-defined, although constantly changing, career structure. Perceptions of teaching as a career change over time and international comparisons are very interesting. The McKinsey Report (Barber et al. 2007) discusses how vital the status of the teaching profession has become to attracting the best graduates; this is linked to history and culture; but they stress how influential teachers themselves can be and how, in synergy with positive government policy, status can quickly (over five years) be raised.

The importance of a regulatory body? The role of a ‘General Teaching Council’

So expert teachers work in a profession that is clearly service oriented and is respected for that dimension, but also has some ongoing issues about its status and its knowledge base. On the point about status, the emergence of the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) relates to the initial discussion above, i.e. does the GTCE add to or diminish teachers’ status? There is little hard evidence to review here.

The establishment of a regulatory body for the profession generally, and potentially to its expert practitioners, should have been a very significant ‘step up’, given the eminence of a body such as the General Medical Council. The 1998 Act that set up the Council gave it two aims: ‘to contribute to improving standards of teaching and the quality of learning, and to maintain and improve standards of professional conduct among teachers, in the interests of the public’.

Therefore, ‘The General Teaching Council exists to support teachers’ professional efforts to offer children and young people high quality teaching that meets their needs and enables them to learn and thrive’ (GTCE website 2009).

The GTCE has the power to ‘strike off’ a teacher from the official list of practitioners and, very occasionally, does exercise this power. The perception among teachers is that this particular function is certainly necessary and to be recognised as such, but that, as the body that fulfils this function, the GTCE is without much significance or influence. It is also not seen as a threat to the autonomy of teachers; this comes from other sources. Put simplistically, the GTCE does not ‘feel’ like a recognition of self-regulation, a mark of a top profession; instead, it is perceived as a bureaucr...

Table of contents

• The Expert Teacher of English
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The effective, extended professional
• Chapter 2 Expertise and models of expert teaching
• Chapter 3 What is English teaching?
• Chapter 4 Teaching English
• Chapter 5 Curriculum and assessment
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7 Working with others
• Chapter 8 Continuing to develop
• Bibliography
• Index