Competence and Performance #5 – Teaching skills

In a this series of posts, Interchange author Jack C. Richards is looking at what distinguishes the very best language teachers, and what we can learn from them. Here, Jack considers the role played by teaching skills.

The initial challenge for novice teachers is to acquire the basic classroom skills needed to present and navigate their lessons. Teaching from this perspective is an act of performance, and for a teacher to be able to carry herself through the lesson, she has to have a repertoire of techniques and routines at her fingertips. These include routines and procedure for such things as:

Opening the lesson
Introducing and explaining tasks
Setting up learning arrangements
Checking students’ understanding
Guiding student practice
Monitoring students’ language use
Making transitions from one task to another
Ending the lesson

What we normally mean by the term teacher training refers to instruction in basic classroom skills such as these, often linked to a specific teaching context. Training involves the development of a repertoire of teaching skills, acquired through observing experienced teachers, and often through practice teaching in a controlled setting, using activities such as micro-teaching or peer teaching.

Good teaching from a training perspective is viewed as the mastery of a set of skills or competencies. Experiencing teaching in a variety of different situations, with different kinds of learners and teaching different kinds of content, is how a repertoire of basic teaching skills is acquired. Over time, experience is said to lead to the development of routines that enable these kinds of skills to be performed fluently, automatically, and with less conscious thought and attention, enabling the teacher’s attention to focus on other dimensions of the lesson (Tsui 2009; Borg 2006).

This view of the process of teaching has been extended through research on teacher cognition (Borg 2006, 2009). Concepts such as teacher decision-making introduce a cognitive dimension to the notion of skills, since each “skill” involves the teacher’s engaging in sophisticated processes of observation, reflection, and assessment, and making online decisions about which course of action to take from a range of available alternatives. These interactive decisions often prompt teachers to change course during a lesson, based on critical incidents and other unanticipated aspects of the lesson.

As teachers accumulate experience and knowledge, there is thus a move toward a degree of flexibility in teaching and the development of what is sometimes called “improvisational teaching.” Research reviewed by Borg and others hence describes some of the following characteristics of expert teachers:

They have a wide repertoire of routines and strategies that they can call upon.
They are willing to depart from established procedures and use their own solutions and are more willing to improvise.
They learn to automate the routines associated with managing the class; this skill leaves them free to focus on content.
They improvise more than novice teachers – they make greater use of interactive decision-making as a source of their improvisational performance.
They have more carefully developed schemata of teaching on which to base their practical classroom decisions.
They pay more attention to language issues than novice teachers (who worry more about classroom management).
They are able to anticipate problems and have procedures available to deal with them.
They carry out needed phases more efficiently, spending less time on them.
They relate things that happen to the bigger picture, seeing them not in the context of a particular lesson.
They distinguish between significant and unimportant issues that arise.

So, while learning to teach from the perspective of skill development can be thought of as the mastery of specific teaching competencies, at the same time these reflect complex levels of thinking and decision making, and it is these cognitive processes that also need to be the focus of teacher training. From the perspective of teacher cognition, teaching is not simply the application of knowledge and of learned skills. It is viewed as a much more complex cognitively driven process affected by the classroom context, the teacher’s general and specific instructional goals, the teacher’s beliefs and values, the learners’ motivations and reactions to the lesson, and the teacher’s management of critical moments during a lesson.

References and Further Reading

Read all the posts in this series: