Layers of Professional Competence

The three headings of professional competence are too broad to act on directly. Each one breaks down into layers. Two of those layers, planning-and-leading and teaching-and-learning, sit inside professional skills and application. A third set of items, the dimensions of development, describes how a teacher grows over a career.

Each layer is described below.

Planning and leading

In planning and leading, the reflective practitioner does several specific things.

Set appropriate learning objectives

Objectives are not picked from a textbook list. They are set based on what students already know, understand, and can do. A learning objective that ignores the starting point of the class is unlikely to land.

The reflective practitioner spends time finding out what students bring to a topic before deciding what the next step is. This takes deliberate effort. Many teachers default to the standard objective for the year level. A reflective teacher pauses on this default.

Plan and evaluate lessons

The teacher plans lessons that enable students to meet learning objectives, and then evaluates whether the lessons did so. Planning without evaluation produces lessons that look good on paper but may not work in the room. Evaluation without planning produces reflection on lessons that were never aimed at anything specific.

The pair is what produces growth. Plan, teach, evaluate, plan again.

Manage workloads and maintain work-life balance

This item often gets dropped from professional development frameworks. It belongs.

A teacher who burns out in three years is not a competent professional, however skilled they are during those three years. Managing workload effectively and maintaining a work-life balance is part of what it means to be a reflective practitioner. Sustainability is a competence.

This requires hard decisions about what to do, what to drop, and what to delegate. Reflective practice helps surface these decisions instead of letting them happen by default.

Teaching and learning

The teaching-and-learning layer is what most people picture when they think about teaching. Several specific items sit inside it.

Create a safe, interactive, challenging environment

A learning environment has three properties at once.

1. Safe. Students can take intellectual risks without ridicule.
2. Interactive. Students engage with each other and with the teacher, not only listen.
3. Challenging. The work is hard enough to require growth.

All three matter. A safe but unchallenging environment is comfortable but produces little learning. A challenging but unsafe environment produces fear and disengagement. A challenging and safe but non-interactive environment loses the social dimension of learning. The competence is to hold all three at once.

Use a range of teaching strategies and resources

Different students respond to different methods. A reflective practitioner builds a range of teaching strategies and uses different ones depending on the topic, the class, and the moment.

A teacher with one default method (lecture, for example) becomes brittle. The same method in front of a different group, or on a different topic, may not work, and the teacher has no fallback. A range of strategies is a kind of insurance against the variability of real classrooms.

Maintain pace within lessons

Pace is a specific skill. Too fast and students fall off. Too slow and energy drains. The reflective practitioner watches the pace of lessons and adjusts in real time and in planning.

This requires reading the room, which itself is a skill that develops with reflection.

Promote a standard of behaviour

Behaviour management is part of teaching, not separate from it. The reflective practitioner works to promote a standard of behaviour that enables all students to learn. Poor behaviour gets handled in the context of school policies and best practice, not through personal anger.

A teacher who keeps reverting to their own emotional reactions in behaviour situations is not yet at competence in this area.

Contribute to the life of the school

Teaching is not only what happens in your own classroom. The reflective practitioner contributes to the life and development of the school as a whole. This might mean staff committee work, mentoring junior colleagues, contributing to policy discussions, or running an activity.

A teacher who only does the minimum required by their classroom contract is missing this layer.

Monitor student progress and give constructive feedback

Feedback that helps students reflect on and improve their learning is a teaching skill, not an assessment task. The reflective practitioner gives feedback often and in ways that students can use.

This requires knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to say it so the student does not switch off. All three are learnable.

Select from a range of assessment strategies

Assessment is not only the end-of-term test. The reflective practitioner uses a range of assessment strategies and uses the information collected to make their teaching more effective. Assessment is for learning, not only of learning.

This connects assessment back to planning. Information from assessment shapes the next lesson. A teacher who assesses but does not let the results change their teaching has incomplete competence in this area.

Dimensions of development

Beyond the layers of competence, there are dimensions of development. These describe how a reflective practitioner grows over time.

As reflective practitioners progress in their careers, they encounter different challenges and expectations. This means three things.

1. Their cognition grows. The way they think about teaching matures.
2. They learn from experience. Patterns emerge across years of teaching.
3. As a consequence of this progression, they become more sophisticated as teachers.

This growth happens along several dimensions.

Greater complexity in teaching

Early in a career, a teacher copes with a single class with mostly similar students. Over time, the teacher takes on greater complexity, including handling significant diversity in a single classroom. The capacity to teach in complex situations is a developmental dimension.

Wider range of teaching strategies

The novice has two or three strategies. The experienced reflective practitioner has many. The repertoire grows over time, not by collecting strategies indiscriminately but by adding strategies that have been tested and found useful.

Wider range of evidence, reading, and research

Early teaching can rely on what was learned in initial training. Mature teaching draws on a wider base of reading, research, and evidence. The reflective practitioner keeps reading throughout their career.

Extending impact beyond the classroom

Influence widens. The teacher participates more fully in the life of the school. They may speak at conferences, contribute to curriculum design, or work with colleagues from other schools.

Capacity for autonomy, innovation, and improvisation

The novice follows the plan tightly. The mature teacher has earned the autonomy to depart from the plan when the situation calls for it. They innovate within their teaching and can improvise when something unexpected happens.

Capacity for self-criticism and self-improvement

Self-criticism is a skill, not a personality trait. It develops through practice. The mature reflective practitioner can examine their own teaching critically without falling into either defensiveness or despair.

Ability to mentor and coach colleagues

The next dimension is impact on others. The mature teacher can help less experienced colleagues develop. This is its own skill.

Modelling good practice

The final dimension is being a model for others. Other teachers learn from how this teacher teaches, how they speak, how they handle difficult situations. Modelling is not about being perfect; it is about being visible in a way that other teachers can learn from.

Flashcard

Name four dimensions of professional development a reflective practitioner moves through over their career.

Tap to reveal

Answer

Greater complexity in teaching, wider range of strategies, wider evidence base, capacity for autonomy and innovation.

Other dimensions include extending impact beyond the classroom, capacity for self-criticism, ability to mentor and coach colleagues, and modelling good practice for others. These dimensions describe how teaching deepens with experience and reflection, not how it stays the same.

What this means for a teacher in early career

A teacher in their first three years cannot expect to be at the upper end of every dimension. The point of the dimensions is not to grade teachers but to give a map of where development can go.

Two practical points follow.

1. Pick one or two dimensions to focus on. Working on everything at once produces shallow movement. Working deliberately on one or two produces real growth.
2. Notice when you are growing. Many teachers grow steadily but do not register the growth, and so feel they are stuck. The dimensions give a vocabulary for noticing what has changed.

A teacher who returns to this list once a year, marks where they have moved, and picks the next dimension to work on, has built a long-term development plan that does not depend on their school running one for them.