This week I am thinking about teachers as experts, not necessarily in the subject area they teach (though they may also be that), but rather in the craft of teaching itself. I have found that in many cases there is a reluctance amongst teachers to consider themselves ‘experts’ or have expertise in either all, or an aspect of, education. Experts are considered to have comprehensive knowledge on a subject and be an authority on that matter, where authority means to have accurate and reliable knowledge of that subject. I believe that this description would fit many educators (I should also note that this same idea could be applied to educational leadership as well).
Like any field of study, there is a range of ability and understanding of pedagogy and education in general. We have masters of their craft and those who are just starting. We have some teachers who are experts in classroom management and some on how to integrate technology into learning.
Yet, despite these skill sets, many of us would be reluctant to identify as ‘experts’ in education. Some of the reasons for this may include something like:
Perhaps it is because education is more nebulous in the day to day effectiveness and the impact of an educator is difficult to measure since we are in a development business rather than a product business. This in turn makes it difficult to have objective measures of success and skill.
It may also be because education is so multi-faceted that we struggle to conceive of anyone being an expert in all the various parts, and if you aren’t an expert in all of them, then you aren’t an expert at all. You may struggle with technology integration but shine at teaching social-emotional learning.
It could also be because in our industry there are so many of us that we are uncomfortable claiming that expert status since we may feel we know generally the same as everyone else in our field.
I think that we often envision expertise as being at the top of the mountain, where there is nothing left to learn and we have all the answers. I would push back on this notion and say that in listening to experts in other fields, they would be the first to say that they had limits to their understanding and continue to learn. In this case, expertise becomes more like a category of practitioner rather than identifying you as being at the peak of the mountain.
The closest I have heard to teachers speaking of themselves as experts is that they can consider themselves ‘expert learners.’ The logical problem with this line of thinking of course is that if we are indeed expert learners then we ought to be able to learn things very well. This continued accumulation of learning would eventually produce mastery which should in turn lead to expertise in whatever it is we are continually trying to learn.
I genuinely believe that we hurt ourselves as a profession when we deny that we have expertise in all or parents of education. There are some that are experts in certain areas and by identifying them we can leverage their knowledge to help grow and support other teachers. As a leader, if you are trying to connect a teacher with another, you want to connect them with someone who will help them grow and develop their skills. In order to do that, you will need to know which teachers those are in order to make this process work. Similarly, if you are creating teacher coaches, you want them to be experts in coaching teachers, since anything less would be ineffective.
While identifying an expert on everything might be difficult, we should at the very least be identifying experts in the various aspects of education if we are to leverage their skills for the betterment of our profession. We can also pair up experts in different facets to combine their knowledge to create some truly wonderful initiatives. This is not about bragging or being full of oneself, but rather the acknowledgement that we have strengths as well as weaknesses. It all starts with identifying our strengths, and giving ourselves permission to acknowledge that we have them, and sharing those strengths with others.
What things do you feel you are especially strong at?