ABSTRACT
The American Food and Drug Administration regulates food safety through risk assessment, forecasting the likely effects and side effects of our actions. This is important for the idea of instructional risk too: knowing the possible outcomes of a course of action, but being aware that the outcomes can change depending on a number of conditions. Ideally, a teacher knows how to most effectively make this happen and why, thereby managing the risks that threaten the most effective learning. Although teachers are licensed as experts, like some other professions such as engineering, medicine and law, their expertise is partly developed through initial training and partly through ongoing professional development. Teachers’ knowledge also reflects the big ideas in the psychology of development. Darling-Hammond and John Bransford represent the features of adaptive and routine teaching expertise along two continua: one is the continuum of innovation, the other is efficiency. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
