expertise illustrate the critical relationship between professional learning and
practice. However, these constructions still focus on the work and abilities of the
individual teacher and overlook the social dimensions of practice that have a critical
influence over the length of a teaching career.
6.7 Accomplished Teaching Across a Teaching Career
The development of expertise is often associated with more experienced practi-
tioners. However, there has been debate about whether this is a characteristic to be
nurtured early in professional life. Levin’s( 2003 ) longitudinal study of teacher
development does suggest that there is growth over a career where thinking
becomes more complex and there is a greater congruency between understanding
and actions. However, discussions have pointed to the difficulty of constructing a
linear framework for career long teacher education. Levin ( 2003 ) also highlights the
grounded quality of expert practice where teachers display a rich understanding of
the context and the learning needs of the particular groups of pupils they work with.
Alongside this we need to be conscious of career cycles. Day and Gu ( 2010 ) point
to critical periods in a teacher’s career in terms of motivation/demotivation and
engagement/disengagement but opportunities to develop and more importantly to
contribute to the school and pupil learning can build resilience. Here the social
context of practice, that is the culture of the school, is critical in determining
whether teachers engage or disengage.
Collins and Evans ( 2007 ) in their bookRethinking Expertise, looked at expertise
in science and though this is in a different domain from education, there is a strong
analogy to be drawn in that science, like teaching, can be characterised as a practice.
Collins and Evans ( 2007 : 14) propose a‘Periodic Table of Expertise’, which helps
us to consider further the nature of expertise including the relationship between the
tacit knowledge of the individual practitioner and the wider social context of
practice. The process of developing expertise has to be about developing sophis-
ticated andflexible forms of tacit knowledge but there is an important social
dimension to this. Collins and Evans identified two categories of specialist exper-
tise. One of the categories is‘contributory expertise’which is akin to the one that
we commonly think of as expertise—the leading scientist in a particularfield. Their
proposal includes specialist expertise and this sits alongside that of‘interactional
expertise’, which comes from being immersed in a community of practice:
Enculturation is the only way to master an expertise, which is deeply laden with tacit
knowledge because it is only through common practice with others that the rules that cannot
be written down can come to be understood. (p. 24)Collins and Evans ( 2007 ) demonstrate that expertise is not simply accumulated
experience. Within science the relationship between interactional expertise and
contributory expertise is fundamental to the generation of ideas and practices—a
combination of peer exploration, review and the individual and collective creative
96 M.A. McMahon et al.