The ongoing discussion concerning quality in education inevitably addresses one of its central challenges – professionalisation of the teacher. Our research project aims to shed more light on the concept of expertise in the teaching profession.

Research of expertise in the teaching profession has been inspired by studies on expertise in other domains. This mostly psychological research adopted two main approaches: the absolute approach, i.e. the study of exceptional individuals, and  the relative approach based on comparative studies of experts and novices (Chi, 2006). Research in teacher expertise has been launched later, however, since the 1980s we have seen a number of studies in different cultural contexts. They either investigate  expertise as a state (e.g. Berliner et al., 1988; Peterson and Comeaux, 1987, Leinhardt, 1989; Turner-Bisset, 2001), or adopt a developmental perspective (Bereiter, Scardamalia, 1993, Tsui, 2005), i.e. focus on development and maintenance of expertise. 

Our research takes into consideration the three currently dominant paradigms in the study of teacher expertise as this paradigmatic plurality yields fairly different characteristics of the phenomenon, each of them capturing its specific aspects. These include: 1) the currently dominant perception of expertise as intuition and tacit knowledge  within a stage model of professional development (Eraut, 1994, etc.),  2) the cognitive psychology based view of expertise as conscious deliberation and organised knowledge base (Glaser and Chi, 1988), and 3) the dynamic view, the perspective of expertise as a process (Bereiter, Scardamalia, 1993). Attention is also paid to a relatively new concept of adaptive expertise (Hatano, Inagaki,1986) as it is linked to new demands and increasing pace of educational change.

The underlying and crucial question in any of the trends, of course, is, how to define and identify an expert teacher. Here our research builds on a study conducted by D.J. Palmer et.al. (2005), further inspiration is provided by a prototypical model by Sternberg and Horvath (1995) and in studies by Bond (2000) and others.

Our research also acknowledges the assumption that teacher expertise is a culture specific issue (Tsui, 2005). Research aims include theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues. The paper will present partial outcomes of the research, namely development of methods for identification  of expert teachers, and for systematic investigation of the nature of their expertise. Further on, the first results emerging from the research will be discussed and put into a comparative perspective in order to account for the cultural differences in the perception of the phenomenon.

Presenters: Michaela Pisova, Vera Janikova and Klara Kostkova

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