Teaching is a highly skilled, demanding and fundamentally vital profession. This kind of statement can unite even politicians and the public and it is a truism that teachers are rightly proud to acknowledge. The dramatic effects on schools of the pandemic have highlighted how difficult teaching is: literally millions of parents have been confronted in their homes by this challenge. Perhaps respect for teacher expertise has never been higher? A different question arises needing new research on whether current and established forms of expertise will need adapting for the “new normal”.
What we currently know is that teachers develop over time a specific form of expertise that enables them to create learning environments that both sustain and challenge their students. So far, so generic. English teachers are typically termed “subject specialists” and that is very much their professional identity; they say “I am an English teacher” and when asked how they feel about their subject the word most commonly offered is “love”. English teachers bring together passion and expertise in student-centred ways. The subject of English itself excites much passion as it certainly does not produce much consensus around either its content or its purpose. As this issue demonstrates, there is much and varied expertise and a single issue can only touch on both the breadth and depth of a subject that itself has so many facets and dimensions. However, each article offers an insight into the expertise of English teachers and also into the processes by which such expertise is developed and sustained, moving from the novice to that much contested term the “expert teacher”.
It is most fitting that we begin with a tribute to a remarkable teacher and scholar, Margaret Meek Spencer. Over a long career, she produced many significant contributions to the field of literacy with an emphasis throughout on the profound value of reading as a holistic act with literary texts being the best teachers of reading for children. Teachers, she argued, are expert readers who use that knowledge to make young readers become their own experts. She inspired multitudes of teachers and other researchers who developed her thinking and became leading figures themselves. She was an internationally renowned scholar and profoundly important in the formation of LATE (the London Association for the Teaching of English), which led to the founding of NATE.
In “Contested Territories”, a comparative research study of experienced teachers in Australia and England, we have insights into the challenging arena of contemporary English teaching. Many of these teachers have remarkable expertise which they deploy to teach successfully and enjoyably despite the many constraints and external pressures bearing down on them in similar ways in both countries. These professionals are a tribute to English teachers’ resilience and integrity.
Simon Gibbons and Bethan Marshall provide another powerful comparative insight into their account of researching English practice in Ontario. They are careful to explain they have a small sample to compare with teachers in England, but their findings are very striking. In Ontario, teachers have real agency, much greater job satisfaction and feel properly respected in terms of their professional judgement and expertise.
One of the classic approaches to understanding expertise in any profession is to compare novices with experts. The Dreyfus model of a continuum of Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient and then Expert is well known. So an expert teacher may be, paradoxically, a very novice mentor for novice teachers. Sue Pinnick’s qualitative study of the mentors of student teachers provides excellent evidence of the challenge of being an effective mentor and especially a reflective mentor as well as a reflective practitioner. Her study concludes that dialogic mentoring is more valuable than handing down performative judgements. Fundamentally, mentoring is a complementary but different expertise to teaching.
Margaret Merga and her colleagues also look at Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and at subsequent and ongoing Professional Development (PD) concerning the preparedness of secondary English teachers to support learners with literacy difficulties. The research described is meticulous and detailed; it confirms that the teachers did not feel fully prepared and that professional development has not fully addressed their needs. They offer some useful suggestions for change. However, this work also highlights what an extraordinary range of expertise is needed by contemporary English teachers in schools with great diversity and scarce resources. Colleagues working in ITE for future English teachers will be reminded of the impossibility of fully preparing their students for the hugely complex task of supporting all learners when both their programme and PD opportunities are so time-limited.
Laura Thomas provides a rich insight into one class of students who are disadvantaged and disengaged. Through a carefully constructed and documented intervention, she provides evidence of how students who are especially negative about themselves as writers can be motivated and engaged. This leads to real improvements in self-esteem and actual writing quality. For all English teachers, the “bottom set” syndrome is a familiar challenge especially in an era of high stake testing. This study demonstrates that individual teachers have both expertise and agency that, properly focused, generates improvements in learning.
In the article by Larissa McClean Davies and colleagues, we move into a wholly new area of innovation and emergent expertise. After considering the role of literature, “close reading” of which is typically seen as the heart of English teaching, we are suddenly challenged by the concept of “distant reading” in an era of “post-digital literary literacy”; the shock of the new. We should remember that these experts are at the leading edge of their field, innovators and challengers of the status quo. They should not be mistaken for “the establishment” as they are always looking to move beyond the safe and the secure. This article is a very fitting final piece of thinking about English teachers and their expertise, proposing profoundly different ways of engaging with literature.
The issue concludes with a review of an important and timely book and one whose topic – teaching grammar – leads us back to an area where very many English teachers feel much more like novices than experts. In the words of the reviewer, John Hodgson: “How to Teach Grammar achieves its aim of presenting grammar as a potentially fascinating, exhilarating and useful approach to understanding and using patterns of language”. He commends the book for its meticulous attention to placing grammar teaching in an area that English teachers do feel matters to students: their capacity to investigate and use language creatively.