Learning from novice–expert interaction in teachers’ continuing professional development

Figures & data

Figure 1. The interconnected model of professional growth (Clarke and Hollingsworth 2002)

Table 1. Information on participants

Name	Gender	Years of teaching experience	Subject
Wendy	Female	1	Chinese language
Emma	Female	1	Chinese language
Tina	Female	1	Moral education
Sarah	Female	3	Moral education

Note: The moral education in Chinese VET schools usually combines four modules: 1) career planning; 2) professional ethics and law; 3) politics and societies; and 4) philosophy and life.

Table 2. Data encoding and definition of concepts

Categories	Concepts	Definition
Comments/advice from expert teachers	General pedagogical knowledge	Knowledge of broad principles, strategies, teaching and learning theories that are not subject-specific.
	Knowledge of context	Understanding of the communities, regions, schools, classrooms and students in the country they live.
	Subject matter knowledge	Knowledge of the professional subject a teacher teaches, which contains syntactic structures, substantive structures and content.
	Pedagogical content knowledge	Knowledge of how to teach specific content in specific contexts, which includes four elements: conceptions of purpose for teaching subject matter; knowledge of students understanding; curricular knowledge; and knowledge of instructional strategies (Grossman 1990).
Sense making	Acceptance	Novice teachers accepted advice of expert teachers without doubt, which will directly lead to the ‘trail’ step.
	Cognitive differences	Novice teachers have different points of view or different teaching methods to experts.
	Reflection	An effort to reconcile the comments of experts and their original cognition or behaviour.
Adapting practice	Neglect	The novice teachers reject the advices from expert teachers for some reason.
	Re-assumption	Repeated construction of better teaching based on the analysis of expert-teachers’ comments and novice-teachers’ own situations.
	Trial	Experimenting with the new assumption proposed by novice teachers or advice provided by expert teachers.
	Feedback	The result of the trial.
Learning outcome	Teaching concepts	Novice-teachers’ new ideas and understanding of themselves as a teachers, their students and teaching.
	Teaching competences	Basic principles of how the novice teachers should perform in the class, including teaching manners, wording and interaction with students.
	General strategies	Strategies that can be widely used in many different situations without a deep analysis of the characters of students and teaching contexts.
	Emotional experience	The change of novice-teachers’ feelings about themselves, students and teaching, which may promote their intention of continuous learning.

Table 3. An example of the coding process

Categories	Concepts	Sub-concepts	The statement of a novice teacher
Comments/advice from expert teachers	General pedagogical knowledge	Lack of pedagogical knowledge (a1)	Tina: As many experts mentioned a lot, a common phenomenon in moral education is sermon (a1). That means the lesson is not connected to students’ life, but it’s like preaching a sermon. However, it’s just my ability and habit (a2) … how to draw my lessons into practice is still hard for me. I am thinking about this problem and keep trying (a3) since the first session …
Sense making	Cognitive differences	Ability and habit (a2)
	Reflection	Self-reflection (a3)
Adapting practice	Trial	Knowing students (a4), (a5)	For example … To relate your lesson to students, you have to know your students better, the background, and their lifestyle and … hmm … just weigh them up (a4). As a head teacher of a class, I have the opportunities to observe my students … Recently many students play the game Minecraft. I don’t like playing computer games, but I still downloaded and tried this game just for understanding my students better (a5). Although I’m not interested in it, but I will try to understand it, and when we talk about it, there would be something special between me and my students (a6). Students will think that their teacher also plays the same thing with them and our relationship would be drawn closer (a7) …
	Feedback	Teacher- student relationship (a6), (a7)
Learning outcome	Teaching competence	Interaction (a8)	It helps me a lot to hold a class meeting and give lessons (a8).

Figure 2. The learning model in novice–expert interaction

Table 4. Learning outcomes from novice–expert interaction

Concepts	Sub-concepts	Statements of novice teachers
Teaching concepts	Reframe teaching	Sarah: ‘I used many cases in my class, some of them could be removed, and I should focus on only one or two cases to make a deep explanation for my students’.
	Self-reflection
	Understanding students
Teaching competences	Teaching manner	Wendy: ‘I pay more attention to motivate my students now … Once I was so focused on finishing my lesson, sometimes I was eager and impatient. I answered my own questions and concluded for my students … (Now) I try to wait my students after I propose a question, and I try to have more discussion with them on their answers’.
	Wording
	Interaction
General strategies	Writing lesson plans	Emma: ‘Give students choice … I think this suggestion impressed me a lot … They (expert teachers) told me to set multiple choices instead of asking open questions … so even if students don’t know the answer, they can still guess it and learn by comparing four choices’.
	Arranging teaching process
	Re-constructing teaching material
Emotional experience	Career identity	Tina: ‘Through the conversation with experts, I was encouraged, and I realised my potential for teaching, I hope I can keep being a teacher in the future’.
	Feeling towards students
	Passion for teaching

Clarke, D. and Hollingsworth, H., 2002. Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth. Teaching and teacher education, 18 (8), 947–967. doi:10.1016/S0742-051X(02)00053-7

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Grossman, P.L., 1990. The making of a teacher: teacher knowledge and teacher education. Columbia: Teachers College Press.

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