The Expert Lens

In this 2017 article, Amanda Shuford Mayeaux, Ed.D., describes the Expert Lens, a finding from research on expert teachers that interpersonal, pedagogical and content knowledge work together as one way of seeing a classroom. The section after the article checks that idea against research on teaching experience and coaching, and asks what leaders can do to help more teachers develop it.

Combining pedagogical elements, content, and interpersonal knowledge

by Amanda Shuford Mayeaux, Ed.D.

Early in my career, I taught sixth through eighth grade mathematics in a rural school deep in the swamps of Louisiana. I had convinced the principal I knew how to teach middle school mathematics, which was a long way from the truth. One October day we tackled the objective of solving percent of discount problems.

Mike, who was incorrectly placed in the “low” class, was often agitated and disengaged. He was in the back of the room rolling his eyes while I tried my best to ignore him. When he raised his hand and started waving at me, I finally responded. He said, “You know this is just like what you taught us in chapter 3, except we are finding a different piece of the equation. I am not sure why you did not teach it all together. That would make way more sense!”

He looked at me with his signature smirk and waited. I took a breath and looked back at chapter 3 and replied, “You know, you are right. Put up your books. Let’s try this another way.” We began a three day quest to understand the overall concepts, make connections, and work together. We built a strong culture in our classroom where questions and challenges were welcome. The students mastered the material and I glimpsed through the Expert Lens for the first time in my career.

The Expert Lens

Through my research of expert teachers, I have discovered one of the standout elements of expert teachers is their ability to make powerful choices through their simultaneously strong pedagogical, content, and interpersonal knowledge. The three elements merge together to create a single expert lens through which the expert teacher views all interactions and activities to positively impact student achievement. The three types of knowledge are fluid and interdependent. When questioned during interviews, the teachers could not separate decisions into pedagogy, content, or interpersonal knowledge, but rather used all three intertwined to make best choices for students.

Interpersonal Knowledge

The first element of the Expert Lens is the Interpersonal Knowledge of the expert teacher. This lens is the optics through which teachers view students’ social and emotional needs. Expert teachers are able to pick up subtle clues from facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and other interactions to understand the needs each student in the classroom. This lens is also the foundation of the classroom culture the teacher and students create.

In each class I visited, the culture was encouraging, open to questions, welcoming of mistakes, and all students felt wanted and appreciated. Humor was often also in play, but respectful and kind. When I asked teachers about their students in the classes I observed, each shared very specific things they noticed and how these elements helped them understand how each student was feeling about the lesson. For example, Suzy shared, “And so there’s Janine, who has come to a conclusion based on evidence from the text that she thinks contradicts Quincy’s idea about the theme.  I saw her eyebrows arch up and her face! Joe’s face was red and he was like, ‘I don’t agree!’ And everybody else was like this and there’s Janine….and she wasn’t just like going along with the crowd. Did you see her face and how she crossed her arms! I was on the edge of my seat waiting for that debate!”

The Pedagogical Element

The pedagogical element of the Expert Lens is the choices the teachers makes in choosing the strategies or teaching methods to use to teach the content and build culture. These methods build upon the interpersonal knowledge as the teacher chooses strategies to help student master content, but also impact culture. For example, in Suzy’s first hour class, the students worked through a poetry analysis activity using a Think Write Round Robin structure to practice the SIFT method for analyzing poetry. During Suzy’s second hour class, the students used the same SIFT method, but the class used a jigsaw discussion structure instead of a Think Write Round Robin.

In our debrief at the end of the day, I asked Suzy to discuss why she used two different grouping methods for the same analysis strategy. She replied, “My first hour is made up of predominately introverts, who do not like to move around too much. Conversely, the students in second block are predominantly extroverts and very active. I chose the SIFT method because it works so well for analyzing any type of poetry. I chose the grouping structures to meet the different social/emotional needs of the two classes. Both classes ended up with the same product and were equally successful, I just had to design the class to meet their discussion needs.”

Content Knowledge

The final element of the Expert Lens is content knowledge. Expert teachers have a highly developed, conceptual knowledge of their content. This understanding allows them to see the content as a whole and understand the big picture connections running across their year. These teachers are able to understand how each moment in each lesson fits into the overall mastery of the content.

Suzy, for example, understood students needed a strategy to analyze poetry, so she chose SIFT. She also understood SIFT would work for any poem despite the complexity. When I questioned her further, she told me, “We work really hard to understand theme and make connections across all types of text throughout the year. SIFT gives students a visual to begin to conceptualize how themes emerge in poetry. We will use similar structures when we began deconstructing literature and nonfiction. I do not want them to just see poetry or short stories, but to see the human experience through text. The big idea is the small pieces of language weave together to create common themes. SIFT does this for poetry and I can build upon the analysis skills for future pieces.”

All Together Now!

For Suzy, these three layers melted into one lens. Suzy’s deep understanding of her content informed her choices about how to apply her pedagogical knowledge in choosing SIFT as an analysis strategy. Her understanding of the social/emotional needs played into how she constructed the group interactions when they applied SIFT. The classes all had the same learning target, but different pedagogical choices were used based on her strong interpersonal understandings of the two classes.

During the lessons, Suzy did not just listen to what students said, but observed everything about every student to understand all the complexities occurring during the lesson. Her questioning and feedback to the groups reflected her observations. I asked her why she called on Ava during the class wrap-up. She replied, “Well, I know Ava struggles with analysis. I don’t know if you saw how I gave her that SIFT organizer with some extra thinking prompts on it? During the lesson, I paid close attention to her and her interactions with her partner. At the end, when she moved the hair out of her face and sat up straight, I saw confidence and realized she had made a connection and would share it with success. I knew her answer and reasoning was sound, but most of all, I wanted her to have the social win of being the one to wrap it all together. She has never done that in class. Did you see how she smiled and told me good-bye? Powerful day for Ava!”

In education, we are always seeking the one thing to make every child successful. From the perfect curriculum to that one canned program to the earth-shifting strategy, we keep seeking. All of these are fruitless pursuits. The one thing is a powerful teacher who possesses highly developed interpersonal, pedagogical, and content understanding and applies these through the Expert Lens.

As for me, my first glimpse through the Expert Lens pushed me to spend the next twenty-five years trying to understand expert teachers. Mike and I had coffee last year after 23 years since I last saw him at eighth grade graduation. I shared how he taught me more about teaching in a single question than I had learned in four years of college. After that fateful October day, I seldom took out a textbook for more than a reference. I taught math for the connections we made across both content and with each other. I focused on building strong relationships with and between my students, helping students piece together the content to see the big picture ideas, and worked hard to deepen my own understanding of the content. Mike is the first person in his family to graduate from college and he told me he kept a few note cards on the wall of his office to remind him of things I had told him. None of these sayings were about mathematics.

Qualities of a great teacher: what the research says about expertise, experience and support

The qualities of a great teacher are often listed as traits, and Mayeaux’s account above argues for something different: expertise shows up in how a teacher combines knowledge of students, teaching methods and subject matter in a single decision. This section sets that description beside research on how teachers grow, so that a school leader can see which conditions make that kind of expertise more likely.

What Mayeaux describes

Mayeaux reports that the expert teachers Mayeaux studied could not separate their choices into pedagogy, content or interpersonal knowledge, because all three were part of every decision. In the example Mayeaux gives, Suzy used the same poetry analysis method with two classes and chose different grouping structures after judging that one class preferred quiet individual work and the other discussion. Mayeaux’s observations come from classroom visits and interviews, so they show how expertise looks in practice and say little about how often it occurs.

How experience contributes

The most useful large body of evidence on growth comes from a 2016 review for the Learning Policy Institute. In Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?, Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky reviewed 30 studies of U.S. K-12 teachers. They found that teachers become more effective over time, with the steepest gains in the early years and continued gains into the second and often the third decade of teaching. Students of more experienced teachers also did better on measures beyond test scores, such as attendance.

The same review is careful about limits. It does not show that every teacher improves with time, only that effectiveness rises with experience for most teachers. It also found that gains are larger when teachers stay in the same grade level, subject or district, and when they work in supportive, collegial settings. The review was published in 2016, and the search for this section found no newer systematic review of teaching experience that could be opened. Mayeaux’s story of a middle school math teacher learning from a student’s question, and then spending twenty-five years studying expert teaching, is consistent with that picture of growth from reflecting on practice.

How coaching can help

A 2018 meta-analysis by Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan in Review of Educational Research pooled 60 studies with causal designs and found that coaching raised the quality of teachers’ instruction by 0.49 standard deviations and student achievement by 0.18 standard deviations. Much of the evidence came from literacy coaching in pre-kindergarten and elementary schools, and the authors report that the effects in larger programs were only a fraction of those in smaller trials. Coaching is one practical route to the habit Mayeaux describes, in which a teacher looks closely at what individual students need and adjusts, but a district should not expect the full effect from a large rollout.

What leaders can do

Taken together, the research suggests four steps that a principal or district can take.

1. Keep teachers in the same grade or subject for several years where possible, so that content knowledge can deepen.
2. Protect regular time for teachers to plan and talk with colleagues, since the review links supportive working conditions to larger gains.
3. Give early-career teachers mentoring and feedback, because the steepest gains come in the first years.
4. Use coaching or peer observation to ask teachers the questions Mayeaux asked, such as why a teacher grouped one class differently from another.

What a great teacher looks like to a parent

A parent visiting a classroom can look for the same signs Mayeaux describes: students who feel free to ask questions, a teacher who notices who is struggling, and lessons whose parts connect. Mike’s question about chapter 3 worked because the culture allowed it, and the teacher listened. That is a more reliable sign of a skilled classroom than any single program or technique.

A leader observing a classroom can use the same questions: what did the teacher notice about this group, which choice followed from it, and how does today’s lesson connect to the goals of the year? Those three questions test the interpersonal, pedagogical and content parts of the lens in turn, and they give feedback that is more specific than a general rating.

Further Reading

1. Digital Learning – Making Learning a Matter of Sheer Joy
2. TES – The ten key attributes of an outstanding MFL teacher
3. Harvard Magazine – Rethinking what liberal-arts undergraduates ought to learn, and how

More on K-12 Teachers