What is an expert teacher? With Paul Kirschner and Nidhi Sachdeva

I've never seen Adam or heard Adam this silent for so long.

My heart's beating 'cause I'm so nervous now.

[laughs]

Like, what's coming?

[laughs]

What, what have you got to be nervous about? Like, I'm a, I'm a lovely guy, innit? [laughs] Um, yeah, look, obviously there's, there's like a lot to, there's a lot to agree with there.

Um, I guess like the way my brain works isn't ...

You've, what you're doing is you're describing like the characteristics of an expert teacher, right, in terms of internal processes and some observable actions like class management.

Um, we're hesitant about whether to define it in terms of ...

We've, we've spoken about students learning things, and that is important.

But like defining it in terms of raw outcomes is always gonna be fraught, because you could have one teacher in one school that gets X outcomes, and then the exact same teacher in a different school that gets Y outcomes.

So the extent to which those outcomes are a property of the teacher rather than the context are difficult.

Um, but, but it, it's interesting that you mention like the rock climbers, right? Because there are millions of people who climb rocks in this world, uh, and only 20 of them who ever become Olympians, right? So, so it would be tempting to define expert as a certain percentage of teachers, or as a certain percentage of performance of teachers.

Um, but it sound- And, and to me, uh, c- 'cause, uh, 'cause I ...

You know, we're gonna dig into this soon, but like I think a lot of this stuff that, I think a lot of the stuff that if you go and see, you know, what we'd define as an expert teacher ... 'Cause I, I've got thoughts on like how difficult all of this stuff is, and the difference between I guess what we could call, if I'm interpreting you correctly, like algorithmic rules based approaches that are easily and readily communicable, compared to more tacit, uh, decisions that are made in the moment that feel more like their wisdom or experience-

Yeah

... based.

Um, and, and, and I guess some, you know, we'll explore that difference quite a bit.

But, but for me, I think that latter category, m- my, my job is to work with teachers and to help them get better.

So it's almost like it's not that I don't care about that let- latter category, but it's that I can't, I can't use it.

I can't tell people to be more wise.

I can't tell people to be more intuitive.

I can't tell people to make more micro decisions.

I can tell people when the boards go up, if there's 80% success, do X.

If it's above 80%, do Y.