Darren Mead - Expert Teacher: Using pedagogical content knowledge to plan superb lessons

I am not sure I have ever read a sharper book on instruction than The Expert Teacher, written by a master classroom educator with remarkable depth of knowledge in educational research.

The book offers a powerful fusion of hands-on experience and underpinning research, and I love the fierce attention to detail in Darrens analysis of exactly what makes a lesson succeed in terms of student understanding. Darren achieves this not just by suggesting practices such as analogies, examples, diagrams and confronting misconceptions, but also by teasing apart exactly what makes those practices effective or not.

I have spent over 40 years in education considering what makes a beautiful lesson, and I still found myself surprised and enlightened by what I encountered on almost every page. Its hard to imagine any teacher reading this book without becoming profoundly more intentional in building and leading effective lessons.

Ron Berger, Chief Academic Officer, EL Education

Darren Mead brings his lifelong professional obsession with pedagogical perfection to life in an accessible and intelligent book which, much like the man himself, is unassuming and not beholden to fashionable ideas.

Alistair Smith,trainer, author anddesignated learning consultant to the Football Association

Reading this book is like sitting in the theatre of the mind of one of the most nuanced, thoughtful and eclectic educators in the world. Darren manages to take everything you took for granted about planning lessons and help you realise that not only is it the most important part of the job, but it can always be done better.

Unlike some other texts which espouse solely academic theory, The Expert Teacher is a true handbook that should be read, revisited, sticky-noted and kept on every teachers person at all times. And while serious in intent, the book is peppered with anecdotes, metaphors and even the occasional simile which will have you laughing out loud.

A truly wonderful companion for all those who believe that every child deserves a teacher who designs wonderful, purposeful and responsive learning experiences.

Chris Harte, Director, Unstuck Learning Design

The Expert Teacher is a wide-ranging and erudite volume on what it means not just to know the content of our subject, but to understand how to teach our subject. It successfully combines links to academic research with a distillation of both Darrens and others years of practice and collaboration, and ultimately provides a framework for improvement for all teachers.

Through the lens of pedagogical content knowledge, we are taken through our students learning journey and their misconceptions to the destination where the important knowledge and skills have been embedded and become part of their constitution. The distinction of the expert teacher from the novice teacher is humanely explored too, making it clear that just as our students have a hard path to follow all teachers must accept the hard graft required to gain expertise in our chosen profession.

This book will prove to be thought-provoking and challenging, and is worth careful contemplation and regular revisiting.

David Paterson, science teacher, Aldenham School,author, blogger and teacher trainer

Darren Mead has always used a vast evidence base to craft learning experiences for his students. In The Expert Teacher he distils and explains what the educational community has learned to date, and effectively translates it into simple-to-implement actions.

Sometimes irreverent, always sage, he exposes and explores the true complexity of quality teaching, while also showing how to tweak existing practice (without increasing workload!). He provides a plethora of tools to aid this process, and helps us to decide when and how to use them at different stages of the learning process.

Darren reveals why expert teaching is an intellectually, emotionally and logistically demanding endeavour, and why becoming an expert in this profession requires extraordinary social sensitivity, real-time assessment-led responsiveness and subject pedagogical expertise. It invigorates the intellectual task of creating balance between planning for the learner and the learning, and offers a one-stop repository for stimulating professional dialogue around the challenges of expert teaching and learning. Misguided, non-evidence-based, received wisdom gets short shrift and is eruditely debunked.

The Expert Teacher raises the bar of expectation for teachers, and brings clarity of insight to the canon of educational research, as well as to the fields of sociology and psychology. It is perfect for those who wish to continue to hone their craft and move themselves and others to the highest levels of professionalism.

Fergus Hegarty, Director of Science, Laidlaw Schools Trust,and Chair, Association of Science Education North East region

Darren Meads tour de force, The Expert Teacher, illuminates the complex business of teaching and learning with absolute clarity and is a must-read for teachers aiming to develop a real professionalism in the classroom.

Painstakingly researched, the book equips the reader with a whole armoury of structuring tools and frameworks, all made accessible by Darrens well-chosen and illuminating applications and anecdotes. The books content and message is also well-balanced, with its nourishing imperative to think deeply and rigorously about the journey of knowledge acquisition wisely countered by its permissive advocacy of tinkering with the exquisite lesson plan mid flow if and when it simply isnt working. A further energy within this wonderful book is a vein of scurrilous and irreverent humour, which provides welcome and nearly always well-judged colour.

The moment has definitely arrived for this book to make a significant contribution to the evolution of the teaching profession.

Mark Moorhouse, Head Teacher, Matthew Moss High School

To observe an expert teacher can be a confounding experience for some: The students just got it, He really has their behaviour under control, I could never teach like her! In The Expert Teacher, Darren Mead reminds us that these outcomes and expert teacher behaviours and the planning of superb lessons can be learned, but require careful consideration of the content to be studied: how it is best sequenced, taught and learned, and its relative conceptual importance. This is the tacit knowledge of the expert, a maestro. To possess this knowledge is remarkable enough; to be able to communicate it is a gift though not to the possessor, but to those who they teach.

Rimsky-Korsakov gave us this gift in his teachings and writings on the orchestra. In The Expert Teacher, Darren Mead gives teachers that same gift.

Martin Said, School Designer, XP Trust

A real strength of The Expert Teacher is its accessibility. Developing educators can often find the language of educational writing a barrier to the ideas being expressed and be turned off; here, however, we have a book written by someone who has no desire to show us how clever they are or to stray into academia at the expense of classroom practice. Darren Mead is able to encapsulate a number of ideas that cross dichotomies and manages to bring them together in a straightforward, insightful and, ultimately, readable way.

Ive not experienced what Darren refers to as his terrible guitar playing, but if this book is even a slight indication of the way that he approaches his work in the classroom then I have no doubts that he is very much an expert teacher.

Colin Goffin, Vice Principal and Alternate Provision Lead, Inspiration Trust