How Teaching Happens

Seminal Works in Teaching and Teacher Effectiveness and What They Mean in Practice

Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick, Jim Heal, Paul A. Kirschner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000613735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Building on their bestselling book How Learning Happens, Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick are joined by Jim Heal to explore how teaching happens. The book seeks to closely examine what makes for effective teaching in the classroom and how research on expert teaching can be used in practice.

Introducing 30 seminal works from the field of education psychology research, the learning sciences, and teaching effectiveness studies, each chapter takes an important work and illustrates clearly and concisely what the research means and how it can be used in daily practice. Divided into six sections the book covers:

• Teacher Effectiveness, Development, and Growth

• Curriculum Development / Instructional Design

• Teaching Techniques

• Pedagogical Content Knowledge

• In the Classroom

• Assessment

The book ends with a final chapter on "What's Missing?" in how teachers learn to teach.

Written by three leading experts in the field with illustrations by Oliver Cavigioli, How Teaching Happens provides a clear roadmap for classroom teachers, school leaders, and teacher trainers/trainees on what effective teaching looks like in practice.

Section 1Teacher Effectiveness, Development, and Growth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228165-1

National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” featured the brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi, affectionately known to their listeners as Click & Clack the Tappet Brothers. First aired in 1977, the deceptively simple formula for their show remained unchanged for over 35 years. Listeners would call in with seemingly insoluble car issues; the brothers would – after joking primarily about themselves, but also about the caller – then offer advice on what was wrong with the vehicle and what to do about it.

What made the show engaging for so many was the way the various symptoms of a troubled car often presented as utterly mysterious at first glance, at least to a novice listener. Chin-scratchers such as, “My car makes a whistling noise when I hit 60mph” would leave most wondering what on earth had happened to bring about such phenomena in the first place. The brothers would then ask a series of questions that didn’t seem entirely connected to the problem, at least not on the face of things: “Does it still whistle when you’re turning a corner? Does it only happen on a cold day? What colour is the car (when they seemed stumped)? Do you tend to park your car on a sloped driveway at home?” before somehow arriving at an entirely accurate determination of the problem and a suggested solution. By the way: they tested whether they were right by the most vexing problems by calling the original caller back to see if their answer was correct. They called this “Stump the Chumps”.

What first seemed like a parlour trick was in reality a product of the expertise Click & Clack had accumulated from the thousands of different car problems they had encountered over time. The brothers were able to ask the right questions and almost always arrive at accurate diagnoses because of their ability to reference vast prior knowledge when confronted with each new problem. The extent of their knowledge meant they could also connect the surface phenomena of the problem to its underlying causes – thus allowing them to get “under the hood” in more ways than one.

This example is very much in keeping with what learning science tells us about anyone who has achieved expertise in a given field. Namely, the honing of an increasingly sophisticated schema representing knowledge items. Anyone who develops sophisticated schema in these ways is able to see more and more how discrete pieces of knowledge in a domain are connected. Rather than seeing isolated facts, they see patterns and connections because they understand the underlying structures of the domain they are exploring. A sure sign that someone is becoming more expert is the ease and automaticity with which they are able to see these networks and transfer old knowledge to new problems. Which is why, for Click & Clack, the whistling of a car at 60mph is much more than just a suspicious sound.

Click & Clack offer us a great example of expertise in the field of car maintenance – but what about the analogous field of human improvement? When it comes to teaching, what does it mean to be an expert and how is this different from being experienced? How might we use a definition of expertise to better prepare and improve teachers over time? This first section of the book deals with such questions by exploring: what it means to be an expert teacher, knowledge growth in teaching, teacher quality’s relationship to student achievement, and how to become a reflective practitioner.

Additional Reading

• Chisolm, P. (2019, February 27). “Does your knee make more of a click or a clack?” – Teaching “Car Talk” to new docs. Shots: Health News from NPR.

Ray and Tom’s step-by-step method of diagnosing car trouble can be applied to more than just your broken down old jalopy. A handful of physicians are using the show to teach medical students how to diagnose disease.

Available via https://tinyurl.com/7cese5uk

• Smith, C. J. (1993). Healing our collective auto-angst: The cultural significance of “Car Talk”. Studies in Popular Culture, 15(2), 35–41.

Available via https://tinyurl.com/hndxak54

The Andy Scale: How Click & Clack answered the age-old philosophical question: Do two people who don’t know what they are talking about know more or less than one person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about?

Available via www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-scale-0

1 An Experienced Teacher ≠ An Expert TeacherDavid Berliner on Teacher Expertise

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228165-2

1 An Experienced Teacher ≠ An Expert Teacher

ARTICLE Learning about and learning from expert teachers¹

QUOTE “Good teaching is judged through reliance on standards applied to the tasks of teaching and related to norms for professional behavior, including moral considerations. Successful teaching is about whether intended learnings were achieved. Judgements of successful teaching are concerned not with the tasks of teaching or professional behavior, but with the achievement of ends.”²

1Berliner, D. C. (2001). Learning about and learning from expert teachers. International Journal of Educational Research, 35, 463–482. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-0355(02)00004-6. Available via https://tinyurl.com/yyb65bek 2Ibid., 468.

Why You Should Read This Article

We all know what an expert chess player, tennis player, physicist, and/or researcher is. And we also know how to spot them. An expert chess player is someone playing at one of the top chess tournaments and has a certain ELO-rating which is a calculation of the relative skill levels of chess players. The higher the rating the better you are with a grandmaster having a rating of 2600 and above. At the time of this writing, Magnus Carlson has a rating of 2875 and is ranked first in the world. He’s also world champion. Tennis players also have a ranking system similar to chess, and so there too we have a ranking with number 1 being the best, but we also have specific tournaments such as the four Grand Slam and the eight mandatory ATP Tour Masters 1000 tournaments which we can use. An expert physicist has either won or been nominated for a Nobel prize or has received similar honours. Yes, even researchers have a more or less objective system to determine who is an expert and who isn’t, namely the i10-Index, which is the number of publications with at least ten citations, the h-index that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar, and of course the absolute number of citations. The question is this: how can we determine what an expert teacher is and what makes them one?

Abstract of the Article

Studies of expertise in teaching have been informative, despite problems. One problem is determining the relative roles of talent vs. deliberate practice in the acquisition of expertise. When studying teachers, however, a third factor must be considered, that of context. The working conditions of teachers exert a powerful influence on the development of expertise. A second problem is that of definition because expertise in teaching takes different forms in different cultures, and its characteristics change by decade. A distinction is drawn between the good teacher and the successful teacher, characteristics of expertise that are often confused. A prototypical model of expertise is described and found to identify teachers who were both good and successful. Discussed also is the importance of understanding adaptive or fluid expertise, automaticity and flexibility. Finally, the development of teacher expertise is seen as an increase in agency over time.

The Article

All schools want expert teachers. Research shows that children taught by expert teachers learn more and/or better.³ Policy makers and governments are even willing to financially reward expert teachers financially and otherwise.⁴ But what exactly is an expert teacher? How do we know one when we see one? What determines if a teacher is an expert or just experienced? Is experience enough or is there more? These are questions that David Berliner looked at when he wrote the article “Learning about and learning from expert teachers”.

3Hattie, J. A. C. (2003, October). Teachers make a difference: What is the research evidence? Paper presented at the Building Teacher Quality: What does the research tell us ACER Research Conference, Melbourne, Australia. Available via http://research.acer.edu.au/research_conference_2003/4/ 4Cutler, T., & Waine, B. (1999). Rewarding better teachers? Performan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: How Teaching Happens
• Section 1 Teacher Effectiveness, Development, and Growth
• Section 2 Curriculum Development/Instructional Design
• Section 3 Teaching Techniques
• Section 4 Pedagogical Content Knowledge
• Section 5 In the Classroom
• Section 6 Assessment
• Glossary
• Index