| Description |
Research of expertise in the teaching profession has been inspired by studies on expertise in other domains. 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; 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 & Chi, 1988), and 3) the dynamic view, the perspective of expertise as a process (Bereiter, Scardamalia, 1993). 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. 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. As regards methodology, the character of our research problem, i.e. expertise, implies multiple case study as an appropriate research design. In accord with the characteristics of case studies (Merriam, 2001) the research utilises combination of methods and comprises both the initial theoretical survey and empirical research. In the empirical research purposive sampling was adopted: the sample was recruited from one relatively tightly delineated domain, that of teachers of foreign languages (mainly English and German). The reasons for that decision are related to the current state of knowledge of expertise in teaching, i.e. mainly domain dependence and pedagogical content knowledge as one of the central aspects of expertise. The recommended number of cases in a multiple case study of a comparable level of complexity is up to 15 (Miles, Huberman,1994). In our research an inverted pyramid approach is used, i.e. the number of samples will gradually narrow down starting from a cohort of 30 teachers. The design of our empirical research includes three phases. The first one will be presented, i.e. partial outcomes of the investigation of the nature of teacher expertise conducted through direct observations with consequent analytical interviews in at least 4 lessons of each teacher and content analyses of the transcripts. Partial results of expertise research will attempt to pinpoint the salient features of teacher expertise focusing specifically on the cognitive and conative domains. In addition to that, methods and design instruments to investigate and assess expertise will be discussed.
|
