This is the slide set that I used for my workshop at THT 2015 in Kyrgyzstan. It includes a discussion of what is an expert, what is professionalism, and professional development for teachers.

1. Teachers Helping Teachers 2015 in Kyrgyzstan
The Expert
Teacher of EFL
Brent A. Jones
Konan University,
Hirao School of
Management

2. Overview
❖ What are we talking about?
❖ Why is it important?
❖ Where are we going?
❖ How might we get there?

3. What are we talking about?
❖ What distinguishes expert teachers from their “novice” or
“competent” peers?
❖ Question One - What would you call a “highly skilled”
teacher?

4. Expert teachers?
❖ The Advanced Skills Teacher
❖ The Excellent Teacher
❖ The highly accomplished teacher
❖ The Chartered teacher

5. Expertise
❖ A high level of knowledge or skill in a specialised area
that is acquired from experience, practice, training or
study.
❖ Knowledge developed within a community of practice
❖ The innate human capacity for extensive adaptation to
physical and social environment
Goodwyn (2011)

6. Dispelling Myths
❖ New research shows that outstanding performance is
the product of years of deliberate practice and coaching,
not of any innate talent or skill.
Ericsson, K., Prietula, M. & Cokely, E. (2007). The making of an expert. Harvard Business Review (July-August), 115-121.

7. Why is it important?
❖ Teachers do make a difference
❖ Teaching as a “profession”
❖ Teaching EFL as a “profession”
❖ Attracting and retaining good teachers

8. Approximately 30% of variability
Teachers do
make a
difference!
John Hattie

9. 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

10. Question Two
❖ What does the word "professional" mean?

11. The concepts of professionalism and professionalization
are ‘essentially contested’, as philosophers say. Outside
education, professions have been represented
theoretically, in the image of those who belong to them,
and who advance their interests as having a strong
technical culture with a specialized knowledge base and
shared standards of practice, a service ethic where there
is a commitment to client needs, a firm monopoly over
service, long periods of training, and high degrees of
autonomy (Hargeaves, 2000).

12. Self-Esteem & Identity
❖ If identity is a key influencing factor on teachers’ sense
of purpose, self-efficacy, motivation, commitment, job
satisfaction and effectiveness, then investigation of
those factors which influence positively and negatively,
the contexts in which these occur and the consequences
for practice, is essential.
Day, C., Kington, A., Stobart, G., & Sammons, P. (2006)

13. Where are we going?
❖ Dreyfus model
❖ Hattie’s 5 dimensions of excellent teachers
❖ Ericsson, et al study

14. Dreyfus model of skill
acquisition
❖ Novice
❖ Advanced beginner
❖ Competent
❖ Proficient
❖ Expert

15. Dreyfus model of skill
acquisition
❖ In the novice stage, a person follows rules as given, without
context, with no sense of responsibility beyond following the
rules exactly. Competence develops when the individual
develops organizing principles to quickly access the particular
rules that are relevant to the specific task at hand; hence,
competence is characterized by active decision making in
choosing a course of action. Proficiency is shown by individuals
who develop intuition to guide their decisions and devise their
own rules to formulate plans. The progression is thus from
rigid adherence to rules to an intuitive mode of reasoning
based on tacit knowledge .

16. John Hattie identified 5 major dimensions of excellent
teachers.
❖ Expert teachers . . .
❖ can identify essential representations of their subject,
❖ can guide learning through classroom interactions,
❖ can monitor learning and provide feedback,
❖ can attend to affective attributes, and
❖ can influence student outcomes

17. Anders Ericsson (Florida State) has found that top performing individuals consistently
demonstrate the following differences compared to novices and lower performing
individuals
- They perceive more. Experts see patterns, make finer discriminations, interpret situations more
quickly and as a result make faster, more accurate decisions. Novices slowly review all information
and don’t have the contextual experience to recognize patterns
- They know more. Not only do experts have more facts and details available to them, they have more
tacit knowledge–that all-important unconscious “know how” that only comes with experience. Novices
rely on limited explicit knowledge
- They have superior mental models. Experience helps experts have rich internal representations of
how things work and how knowledge is connected. They use this to learn and understand situations
more rapidly. Novices rely on simple, sometimes inaccurate, rules of thumb and loosely connected
knowledge
- They use personal networks more effectively. Experts know who to go to for help and answers.
Novices are not able to identify access critical information and people as quickly
- They have superior “meta-cognition”. Experts are better self-monitors than novices. They set goals,
self evaluate against a standard, and make corrections and adjustments more quickly from feedback

18. How can we get there?
❖ Deliberative Practice
❖ Professional Development
❖ Reflective Practice (Reflective Teaching)

19. Deliberate Practice
❖ It must be designed to improve performance. Opportunities for practice must have a
goal and evaluation criteria.
❖ It must be based on authentic tasks. The practice must use real work and be
performed in context.
❖ It must be challenging. The tasks selected for practice must slightly outside of the
learners comfort zone, but not so far out as produce anxiety or panic.
❖ Immediate feedback on results. Diagnostic feedback must be continuously available
both from people (coaches) and the business results produced by the activity.
❖ Reflection and adjustment. Feedback requires reflection and analysis to inform
behaviour change.
❖ 10,000 hours. For complex work, ten years seems to be the necessary investment of
in deliberate practice to achieve expertise.
Tom Gram, 2013

20. Supporting the Novice to Expert
Journey
❖ Action Learning. Small teams create a plan of action to solve a real business problem. Impacts of these
actions are observed, analyzed, lessons extracted and new actions prepared.
❖ Cognitive Apprenticeship. The standard apprenticeship model updated for knowledge work. Instead of
demonstrating a manual skill, experts model and describe their thinking to “apprentices” who then work
on the same problem while they articulate and verbalize their own reasoning.
❖ Communities of Practice. Groups with common professional or project goals work together sharing and
discussing best practices. In doing so they develop rich tacit knowledge that is often impossible in formal
learning programs.
❖ Simulation and Games. Great simulations are a surrogate for real experience. This allows the learner to
attempt challenging tasks, experience failure and learn from errors–all critical elements of deliberate
practice.
❖ Feedback in the Workflow. Wonderful natural feedback exists in the form of business results and
performance data. We don’t tend to think of it as a learning tool, but in the context of deliberate practice,
it’s one of the most powerful.
❖ Stretch Assignments with Coaching. One of the most powerful approaches to “practice” is challenging
work assignments that push current capabilities.
Tom Gram, 2003

22. 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 you’re trying to learn.
❖ --Donald Schön (1987)

23. Metaphorical Thinking
❖ A teacher is . . .
❖ My students are . . .
❖ My class is . . .
❖ My school is . . .

24. Espoused Theories & Theories
in Use
❖ Analyze you metaphors for the values, beliefs and
assumptions they contain.

25. Skillful demonstration
❖ Experts are able to demonstrate things with great skill,
but they often disguise difficulty unintentionally by
making things look easy. A good demonstration is one
that reveals its difficulty in a meaningful way.
❖ Jerome Bruner