Expertise, Experience, and Effectiveness

In his 1986 AERA Presidential Address, David Berliner (1986) elevated the issue of teacher expertise to a lofty position in teaching research, where it has remained securely. Bloom's (1986) work had led in that direction, an almost predictable extension of an era focused on teacher effectiveness. Kennedy (1987) recently reviewed the various theoretical approaches to expertise, and the topic has been no stranger to teaching researchers in physical education (Housner & Griffey, 1985). Given our study of efSective elementary specialists, who varied in degrees of experience, it seemed useful to consider them also in terms of expertise. Berliner's seminal article lays out convincingly the reasons for studying expert teachers, yet seems less than satisfactory when specifying criteria for identifying expert teachers. One is confronted immediately with the sticky task of distinguishing between effectiveness and expertise, which is even more confounded when experience is factored into the equation. The first article in this monograph contains evidence that justifies the use of the term effective when talking about the seven teachers in our study. The start-of-the-school-year study (see article by Fink & Siedentop) gave us an immediate indication that our assumptions of effectiveness in choosing teachers to include in the study had been warranted. As we had suspected, the effectiveness of the experienced teachers looked a bit different than that of the intermediate and 1st-year teachers. All seven teachers established routines and set clear behavioral parameters for their children. The function of experience was not so much in what they accomplished-predictability, expectations for on-task behavior, routinization of managerial tasks-but in how they accomplished it. The more experienced teachers paced events more smoothly, followed up more deliberately on important behavioral specifications, and utilized content more imaginatively to teach routines. One way to conceptualize the differences between the 1st-year teachers and the veterans was the ease with which they accomplished their start-of-school-year goals. In this study we saw differences that seemed strikingly similar to those reported by Shulman (1987):