This book is about primary science education. It presents the latest evidence-informed ideas, strategies, resources and information for your consideration as you build your knowledge and expertise as a teacher in this foundational learning area. Underpinned by the premise of building your own and your students’ science identity, there is a focus on learning through using local outdoor areas, socio-scientific issues and current events as stimuli for questions and investigations to better understand how science is practised in the real world, and that it is a ‘messy’ human endeavour – particularly when it comes to solving real-world issues. Each chapter and its sections respond to questions about why we teach science in primary school, how students can demonstrate their learning, how to plan effective lessons and learning sequences, the teacher’s role in a primary science classroom, how the integration of other learning areas and cross-curriculum priorities can be used to support the learning of science concepts when there are compelling synergistic links, and much more.

This chapter begins by identifying Sternberg and Horvath’s (1995) ‘expert teacher prototype’ as an appropriate, flexible framework for researching and describing teacher expertise. The framework serves as a means to identify the ‘family resemblances’ among expert teachers rather than as a checklist of necessary and sufficient features. The chapter then reviews previously used criteria for identifying teachers for expertise studies, with particular attention to Palmer et al.’s (2005) review of these. The majority of the chapter is devoted to reporting the findings of a comprehensive systematic literature reviews of prior empirical research into teacher expertise, identifying robust findings from studies investigating six aspects of teacher expertise: the knowledge base, cognitive processes, beliefs, personal attributes, professionalism and pedagogic practices of expert teachers. The chapter then discusses what is missing from this expert teacher prototype as researched to date, identifying particularly the strong Northern bias in this research and why this is problematic. It reports briefly on the only detailed study found that researched expert teachers in a Southern context (Toraskar, 2015), which, due to the methodological difficulties the author encountered, is of limited use only.

This chapter offers a detailed description of important similarities and shared features among the eight teacher participants in the case study, discussing these commonalities as both a ‘quintain’ (Stake, 2006) and a ‘prototype’ (Sternberg & Horvath, 1995) of Indian secondary teacher expertise, offering extensive extracts from lessons and interviews to do so. It covers the participant teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning, their interpersonal practices, their languaging practices, how they managed their curriculum, prepared resources and planned lessons before offering a detailed description of aspects of their classroom practice, including lesson structuring, negotiation and improvisation, whole class teaching, learner-independent activities, teacher active monitoring of learners, assessment and feedback practices. Evidence is also provided on commonalities concerning their knowledge base, reflective practices and professionalism. The chapter closes by offering a number of brief examples that serve to relate the practices and cognition of these teachers to the contextual constraints, challenges and affordances typically experienced by teachers working in the global South.

This chapter compares the findings of the author’s teacher expertise case study, conducted in India, with those of prior teacher expertise studies to establish the extent to which ‘family resemblances’ exist within this wider, ‘fuzzy’ grouping of teachers identified as experts in varied contexts around the world. It does this for twelve categories: knowledge base, cognitive processes, beliefs, personal attributes, professionalism, interpersonal practices, languaging practices, lesson planning and preparation, structure and freedom, interaction dynamics, pedagogic strategies and assessment practices, each with extensive reference to the wider literature on teacher expertise. The chapter concludes by offering an analysis of the extent to which the practices of the eight expert teachers involved in my study are, or are not, consistent with conceptions and models of learner-centred education (LCE) as often promoted in the international development literature. It finds both similarities and differences to LCE, the former becoming particularly evident when their practices are compared with those of their peers, yet it would be an oversimplification to interpret their practices solely using this construct.

This chapter systematically analyses observed differences among the eight teacher participants in the case study, both to understand the nature of these differences and to investigate potential causes. It makes use of an analytical framework that emerged during data analysis to position the eight teachers on a two-dimensional field according to two broad areas of clinal difference theorised – ‘Conception of Subject’ and ‘Degree of Control’, which are partially analogous to Bernstein’s (2000) constructs of ‘classification’ and ‘framing’. More specific features of pedagogic practice where variation was evident were plotted on the field equidistant between teachers who shared them to find that the likelihood of a teacher engaging in each was well predicted by the two key variables. The chapter concludes by offering critical reflections on Bernstein’s sociological framework, arguing that while certain elements (e.g., classification and framing; performance and competence models) offer useful insights into differences in practices among Indian teachers, others (namely official and pedagogic recontextualising fields) fail to capture the complex, multiple layers and relations influencing classroom practice in basic education in India.

This concluding chapter recaps briefly on the key arguments presented in the book. It notes that Southern expert teachers are able to effectively facilitate learning regardless of the challenges of context that they face precisely because their expertise evolved in equilibrium with these challenges. Such challenges should, nonetheless, not be seen as acceptable in any context. The chapter argues that expert teacher studies deserve a more prominent place in international discussion on ‘what works’ in education in developing countries; their high ecological validity and potential for contingent generalisation mean that they can be of enormous use in developing models of appropriate pedagogy for both individual contexts and wider generalisation across the global South. The need for further expertise studies in Southern contexts is also underlined to help ‘flesh out’ the differentiated expert teacher framework proposed in Chapter 10, and it is argued that until we understand the practices of expert teachers in diverse contexts we cannot claim to truly understand teacher expertise itself.

This chapter provides a rationale for the book and the research that it presents. It documents the near complete absence of prior research into teacher or teaching quality in the global South and justifies specifically why teacher expertise research may be the most useful vehicle through which it can be studied. It argues that the contextually appropriate, feasible and sustainable pedagogic practices of expert teachers in any context can, if implemented more widely across the educational system, bring about significant increases in the quality of teaching and learning. The chapter offers a definition of ‘global South’ specific to the aims and contexts of the book and compares this with alternative ways of conceptualising the South. My background, as author of this book, is then presented, followed by an overview of the book that includes brief summary descriptions of the chapters that follow. The chapter finishes with a discussion of paradigmatic concerns that sets out the author’s own position as a multiple- methods, critical realist researcher who rejects the paradigm dichotomy between positivist and interpretivist approaches, instead preferring to view generalising and particularising tendencies in research through a continuum along which researchers are able to move flexibly, appropriate to the questions or problems of interest under investigation.