Moving Towards Teaching Expertise
By: Heather Kretschmer
At a small, private language school, a line manager, Greg, is busy onboarding a new teacher, Olivia. Greg has given Olivia the textbook and told her what she needs to know about the course (topics, typical tasks, students’ language level, assessment, organizational information, etc.). Since Olivia already has several years of teaching experience under her belt, Greg feels confident that she’ll easily step into her teaching role at his school. However, just a few hours before her first class session, Olivia asks him what exactly she’s supposed to do during class.
Somewhat perplexed, Greg gives Olivia some additional ideas for tasks she can give her students. But then she asks yet again what exactly she has to do. As their conversation unfolds, Greg learns that in Olivia’s previous job, her employer provided teachers with pre-made lesson plans where each class session was broken down into the smallest possible parts. Teachers just followed the plan. As a result, Olivia did not know how to plan lessons.
At this point in the interaction between Greg and Olivia, Greg slips into the role of teacher. What is going on in his brain (besides a slight feeling of panic that he’s hired a teacher who doesn’t know how to do an essential part of the job)?
Apps et al. (2015) investigated what happens in teachers’ brains as they monitor their learners’ progress. In the experiment, subjects were assigned a “teacher” role. First, they played a game where they saw ten colored shapes, one by one. For each shape, the subjects were given four possible responses, one of which was correct, and the subjects learned the correct response by trial and error. After learning the correct association for each shape, the subjects assumed their teacher role. Each subject was paired with a confederate, who took on the “student” role to learn those same associations. The teacher’s task was to pay attention to the student’s responses, determine whether each response was correct, and then deliver feedback via a keypad. The researchers found that the subjects’ anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region responsible for different functions including error detection, appeared to monitor the student’s accuracy each time the student selected a response.
Now, if we examine Greg and Olivia’s case again, it’s not the same as the one described in the experiment. Olivia wasn’t giving Greg her responses to a set of instructions. Yet, the two situations show similarities. Greg was expecting Olivia to need far less support to do her job than she actually did. Likely, Greg’s anterior cingulate cortex was activated when he noticed his erroneous assumption, a prediction error in terms of predictive processing. This is also what happens when we’re working with students and notice that their knowledge and skills don’t line up with our expectations.
Interacting with students is a key step towards gaining teaching expertise. But the experiences alone aren’t enough. To learn from our student-teacher interactions, we need to retrieve our memories of those interactions and reflect on them. Since memories are strengthened each time we activate them (link), actively sifting through our memories will help avoid the problem of forgetting key teaching experiences. Unfortunately, we often get so bogged down in the daily teaching grind that we don’t take the time to reflect. Jennifer Gonzalez provides teachers with a useful end-of-the-schoolyear reflection activity in her Gut-Level Teaching Reflection. Although she’s addressing schoolteachers in the USA, I think the reflection questions she poses are equally worthwhile for teachers in other contexts to ponder, and I invite you to tweak her questions to fit your teaching context:
- Look around your classroom (or picture it in your mind). What parts of the room make you feel tense, anxious, or exhausted? What parts make you feel calm, happy, or proud?
- Open up your plan book (or spreadsheet, or wherever you keep your lesson plans from the year) and just start browsing, paying attention to how you’re feeling as your eyes meet certain events. What days and weeks give you a lift when you see them, a feeling of pride or satisfaction? Which ones make you feel disappointed, irritated or embarrassed?
- Take a look at your student roster. What do you feel when you see each name? Which names make you feel relaxed, satisfied and proud, which ones make your chest tighten with regret, and which ones make your stomach tense?
- Mentally travel from classroom to classroom, picturing each teacher in the building. What are your feelings as you approach each one? Which coworkers give you a generally positive feeling, which ones are neutral, and which ones make you feel nervous, angry, or annoyed?
- Look at the following professional practice “buzzwords.” As you read each one, do you have positive, negative, or mixed feelings? What other words have you heard a lot this year that give you a strong feeling one way or the other?
In the reflection activity, Gonzalez encourages teachers to look back and focus on five different teaching areas: the physical classroom, lessons, students, colleagues, and teaching buzzwords (technology, differentiation, and flipped learning are three of her buzzword examples). Interestingly, her reflection questions center on how teachers feel about each category. We know that emotions are an important part of learning, and it’s no different for learning about teaching and teaching itself. I find my emotions color every teaching moment. Gonzalez suggests we use our feelings to pinpoint problem areas in our teaching. Next, she recommends deciding on a few priorities for each category and creating a doable action plan. I especially like how she encourages us to share our reflections with another teacher we trust: “We work too often in isolation, but we all have the same struggles. Opening up to other teachers is one of the best ways to grow as a teacher and love what you do.”
Gonzalez gives us a useful reflection tool to improve our teaching. But, as we gain expertise as teachers, we may find that our teaching skills plateau. Maybe we feel we’re making the same mistakes over and over, or perhaps we find our methods and activities aren’t garnering the results we’re aiming for. Sometimes our response is to stop trying and say our skills are good enough. But, possibly, we can overcome these obstacles[1] and improve. In the video What it Takes to Become an Expert, Zach Star explains that moving towards expertise requires stepping outside our comfort zone and focusing on what we struggle with. To do so, we need to engage in deliberate practice, which involves zeroing in on a skill area we can’t do yet in order to figure out how to master it. With deliberate practice, you focus on how you’re currently doing something, where the problem might lie, and what you have to do to improve. This takes effort, time, and willingness to try something different than you have been doing.
Returning to Greg and Olivia, let’s imagine Greg deals with the immediate problem by explaining the class activities in more detail and giving Olivia his own lesson plans and all his teaching materials. This support doesn’t end up pushing her out of her comfort zone to address her underlying problem: how to plan lessons. She follows his lessons without thinking up and trying out her own ideas. It’s enough to do the teaching job she was hired to do at his school, but when Greg asks her to teach a different course, the same issue crops up. Greg learns from his mistake by giving her his lesson materials and guidance on lesson planning, thus scaffolding this teaching skill and ultimately giving her more agency.
[1] Please note that the obstacles I’m referring to here are teaching areas that are within our control (i.e., skills we can develop). Many, many things in our teaching contexts are beyond our control, for example, the institutional culture, educational policies, and systemic barriers.
As Greg’s first “solution” to Oliva’s problem clearly demonstrates, it’s easy to flounder when we take on a teaching role. And while it’s undeniably useful to search for specific advice to a problem, I find taking a step back and looking at the broad teaching picture is equally valuable. In her thought-provoking book The Teaching Brain: An Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education, Vanessa Rodriguez characterizes teaching as a complex, dynamic system involving the interaction between teachers and learners. Teaching is a cognitive skill we naturally engage in as humans—even small children teach—and one that we develop our entire lives. Rodriguez notes that “[a]s we develop, our trajectory will likely present fits and starts, spurts and plateaus, where we strengthen one aspect of our teaching but struggle a bit when we begin to develop a new one” (p. 135). She believes that for teachers to gain expertise, they have to develop a comprehensive theory of the learner’s brain. To do so, teachers need to foster different types of awareness: of their learners, of their interaction and relationships with their learners, of their own self as a teacher, of their teaching practice, and of their teaching context. A key question Rodriguez asks is “What is going on in your mind and brain when you teach?” (p. 176). This question invites us to reflect not only on our own teaching but also, in my opinion, calls for more research on teachers’ brains. Far less research has been conducted on teachers’ brains than on learners’ brains (link).
Developing teaching expertise is an arduous journey full of trials and tribulations . . . and in equal measures joy, deep satisfaction, and delightful surprises. Along the way, we gain so much wisdom from our more experienced colleagues and mentors. And as we hone our skills, we can share this hard-won expertise with less experienced colleagues, thus passing on the teaching torch.
References
Apps, M., Lesage, E., & Ramnani, N. (2015). Vicarious reinforcement learning signals when instructing others. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35(7), 2904-2913. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3669-14.2015
Rodriguez, V., & Fitzpatrick, M. (2014). The teaching brain: An evolutionary trait at the heart of education. The New Press.
Heather Kretschmer has been teaching English for over 20 years, primarily in Germany. She earned degrees in German (BA & MA) and TESL (MA) from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently she has the privilege of working with Business English students at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.