Alyssa Johnson

Music Teacher Development Synthesis

I grew as a teacher in many ways during my experience teaching second and third
graders in practicum. I grew much more comfortable talking in front of the class and trusting
myself to be able to make decisions without a lesson plan in front of me. I also learned how
much planning and detailed thought must go into creating a successful lesson.
Throughout this semester I realized the importance of keeping students engaged in the
material and how you word something can greatly affect how students will respond to it. I
observed that the students were often more responsive when activities were posed as a
challenge, and were more conscious of the time we had available to get an activity done.
Teaching was a constant learning process, and along the way I learned a lot about
myself as well. I learned that I can trust myself to make the right decisions and teach without a
guide or notes in front of me. Being confident in myself makes a huge difference in my teaching
persona and how effectively I am able to command the class. However, confidence comes with
thorough planning which I found was incredibly important. Accounting for little details and
thinking over key phrases is vitally important.
David Berliner has investigated the differences between expert and novice teachers and
has developed a model to explain how expertise in teaching develops. His model describes five

stages of expertise; Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent Teacher, Proficient Teacher, and
Expert. According to Berliner, the primary goal of the novice teacher is to gain experience.
Berliner describes the Novice teacher as inflexible and conforming to rules and
procedures almost regardless of context. Advanced Beginners are different from the Novice in
that they have a more sophisticated knowledge base from which to operate. Teachers become
more aware of the important of context, and begin to recognize similarities across different
contexts. Strategic knowledge, which is knowing when to ignore, break, or follow rules, is
developed. However, they may not be able to take full responsibility for their classroom
because they are focusing on trying to make sense out of varying classroom events and
contexts.
I believe I am currently somewhere in between Novice and Advanced Beginner. I started
out as a Novice and felt inflexible in the lesson plan procedure. I didnt account for how my
students might not respond in the way I expected, and didnt want to stray too far from what I
had planned to explain concepts in different ways or go into detail about material that wasnt
understood. As I gained experience, I grew more flexible and understood that it is necessary
and more productive to adapt the lesson to my students learning.
I plan to grow as an educator in my next semester during practicum and during student
teaching next fall. During this time I plan to develop into a Competent Teacher. To achieve this
during student teaching I plan to improve at thinking on my feet when enacting goals, have
more control over events around me, and become better at determining what is important or
not, when to attend to or ignore something, and deciding when to stay on or move off a topic.

As Berliner states, expertise is acquired primarily through experience coupled with the ability to
link knowledge gained from experience to the generation of new knowledge in new situations. I
plan to work hard to gain the experience I need and use it to grow as an educator.