is to resolve an engineering problem, make a medical diagnosis or teach a group of
learners. Schon’s work begins to open up the question of how an experienced
practitioner acquires expertise. He argues that mastery is acquired through practice
and reflection. While practice and reflection are vital, new ideas and insights are not
necessarily drawn on; there is a strong danger of over-routinisation. Therefore,
Schon’s model too is not fully adequate. Expertise is not just the process of
becoming more skilled and so more efficient in the same sets of practices because
there seems to be a generative dimension.
Some of the most comprehensive studies related to the question of teacher
expertise have been conducted by Berliner ( 2001 ) and in these discussions we see a
tension between routinisation of practice and the ability to make subtle changes
according to the immediate circumstance. Thus Berliner ( 2004 : 200) argues that
expert teachers:
- often develop automaticity and routinization for the repetitive operations that are
needed to accomplish their goals - are more sensitive to the task demands and social situations when solving
pedagogical problems, are more opportunistic andflexible in their teaching than
are novices - represent problems in qualitatively different ways than do novices
- have fast and accurate pattern-recognition capabilities (whereas novices cannot
always make sense of what they experience) - perceive meaningful patterns in the domain in which they are experienced, they
may begin to solve problems slower but they bring richer and more personal
sources of information to bear on the problem they are trying to solve.
Hammerness et al. ( 2005 ) also point to what might seem to be paradoxical in the
practice of expert teachers: they display high degrees of efficiency as they perform
variety of activities skilfully but at the same time they readily break these routines
and rules by being innovative and so move beyond their existing expertise.
Therefore, expertise is not simply about skill and efficiency but there are questions
about motivation, engagement and commitment. Further, in Hammerness et al.’s
construction expertise is about a constant process of development. Opfer et al.
( 2011 ) identified this issue of teacher development as central in looking at the
building of teacher expertise. Opfer et al. explored the relationship between a
teacher’s individual orientation to learning and their practice and identified a
continuum offive broad orientations towards learning. At the opposite ends of this
continuum werefirstly, teachers who were in the‘engaged learners’category and
secondly, teachers who were in the‘infrequent learners’category. Whereas for the
engaged learners, there was a high alignment in both their beliefs and practices
related to learning, this alignment was not evident in the practice of the‘infrequent
learners’. Thus, there seems to be a critical relationship between teacher effec-
tiveness and their attitude and approaches to their own development as learners.
Teachers who are engaged as learners with regard to their own learning are more
ready and effective in fostering the learning of their pupils. These studies of teacher
6 The Development of Accomplished Teaching 95