I’ll Have All Of That To Go, And A Cup Of Coffee Please

Building Teacher Quality
Distinguishing Expert Teachers from Novice and Experienced Teachers.
Reflections on a paper delivered by John Hattie at the Australian Council for Educational Research Annual Conference, University of Auckland, October 2003.

I have found this article by John Hattie to be very inspiring and I am glad to see the distinctions of the human nature of an expert teacher being identified. For me the distinctions of the expert teacher are all the qualities of a leading edge human being. Here are some of the distinctions listed in the 16 prototypic attributes of expertise:- organise, combine, relate, change, recognize, detect, predict, identify, determine, responsive, opportunistic, flexible, anticipating, improvising, monitor, understand, interpret, insight, integrated, respect, involved and caring, automatic cognition, distinguish between surface & deep learning. Wouldn’t every human being like a fair bit more of all of that? I know I would. John Hattie stated that his search was driven for the purpose of developing appropriate professional development; well bring it on because I would enrol tomorrow! I think it is extremely refreshing to know that the teaching profession is now looking back and asking, what are the humane qualities needed in every teacher to have the teaching profession be held in esteem, as it once was.

A thousand years ago when I did my final exam for my Grade 10 pass one of the questions was;

Q. In language what were the hands used for?

o A form of communication

o Nose picking

o Genital manipulation

I remember being so upset at the question and the teacher, who was the head of the school English curricular and who wrote the exam paper, that I wanted to make a formal complaint to the Department of Education. I never did make that complaint but I left school thinking that all teachers were nothing but a bunch of losers. The maths teacher was such a tyrant only one or two people passed maths the year he arrived. I remember all the people from his class running down the hallway when the results were released because he was on the warpath. The science teacher quit after us (and I don’t blame him) and became a gardener on an island and I remember my class 6 teacher coming back into the class room after being absent for a time, picking up a student by the front of his shirt and throwing him across four chairs, and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I remember ……..

I know none of these people became teachers to traumatise children, or in the case of the science teacher, to be traumatised by children. When I was at school hitting children with “the cane” was considered appropriate punishment, now not only has “the cane” been abolished but the word punishment is not even used. It has been replaced with phrases like; anticipate and prevent disturbances, recognise possible barriers to learning & seek ways to overcome them, receptive to student needs, seek and use feedback about their teaching. I think Hattie’s study and findings are very timely in that teachers are ready to inquire into themselves about what it means to be an expert teacher. With Hattie’s appropriate professional development for the expert teacher I am sure a person would emerge with deep insight into their own behaviour and thrown ways of being and have gained a level of self mastery so as to avoid using the classroom as an outlet for unexpressed immature frustrations.