Good Teaching is about Adaptive Expertise

Developing adaptive expertise in teaching requires: 

1. Opportunities to develop Pedagogical Content Knowledge
   
2. Opportunities to practice eliciting, understanding, and responding to student thinking
3. Opportunities to work with student thinking, around content, in increasingly complex contexts.

Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Adaptive Expertise

Pedagogical Content Knowledge includes knowledge of content, knowledge of pedagogy, and knowledge of students.  These three aspects work together with each element working to shape the other two. (Shulman, 1987)

Teachers must attend to the needs of diverse learners in ever-changing contexts. They cannot rely on routine practices and technical proficiency. At the same time, they cannot constantly reinvent the wheel. Teachers must apply previous experience to create novel solutions to the problems of teaching that unfold in their classrooms.

 Adaptive expertise requires balancing innovation and efficiency.

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Pedagogy for learning to teach:
1) See a teaching practice
2) Break it down
3) Try it out

 Framework for Learning Professional Practice (Grossman, et. al., 1999)
This framework consists of:
1) Representations of practice.  These include videos of authentic teaching selected to highlight the particular practices under consideration. As well as live model lessons conducted by expert practitioners.
2) Decompositions of practice.  These explanations draw teachers attention to key components of the complex teaching practices, providing a language to talk about teaching moves.
3) Approximations of practice.. These rehearsals of practice provide teachers an opportunity to try out their new learning in a low stakes environment with immediate feedback.

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References:

• Schwartz, D. L., Bransford, J. D., Sears, D., & others. (2005). Efficiency and innovation in transfer. Transfer of Learning from a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1–51.
• Shulman, L. S. (1998). Theory, practice, and the education of professionals. The Elementary School Journal, 98(5), 511–526.
  
• Grossman, P. L., Smagorinsky, P., & Valencia, S. (1999). Appropriating tools for teaching English: A theoretical framework for research on learning to teach. American Journal of Education, 108(1), 1–29.
  

The University of Missouri offers a Bachelor's of Science in Education (B.S. Ed)  with certification in middle school and secondary Language Arts. Details of the program can be found here.