ABSTRACT
The Prologue introduced the notion of ‘expert teaching’ and herein lies a problem. There is no agreement as yet as to what this might be. Several terms have been used to describe good or excellent teaching and teachers. There is ‘good teaching’ (Brown and McIntyre 1993); ‘effective teaching’ (Perrott 1982; Cullingford 1995; Cooper and McIntyre 1996; Kyriacou 1997); ‘creative teaching’ (Woods and Jeffrey 1996); ‘veteran teachers’ (Shulman 1987a); ‘quality teaching’ (Stones, 1992); and even ‘good enough teachers’ (Cullingford 1995). OFSTED use the term ‘outstanding’ in their criteria for both teachers and student-teachers in training, to denote the very highest levels of teaching performance. The most recent large-scale research into effective teaching, the Hay McBer Report (DfEE 2000), uses the terms: ‘competent;’ ‘effective;’ and ‘outstanding’ to describe different levels of quality in teaching. The problem with all these terms is twofold: such terms are sometimes used interchangeably, while logically there is reason to think that there might be differences between them; in addition, educators do not always agree as to how the very best teaching can be defined, or what criteria might be used to to describe it. This chapter is intended to do four things. It presents: a discussion of ways of conceptualising teaching; surveys some of the research into teaching of the last four decades; gives a brief overview of the kinds of knowledge considered necessary for teaching; and presents a new paradigm of teaching as a knowledge-based profession.
