This chapter focuses on teacher professionalism. In response to vigorous debates initiated in the disciplines of education and sociology, this issue has been discussed with varying degrees of intensity in the field of English language teaching over the past three decades. The concept of teacher professionalism, however, has an intricate nature. Its complexity partially results from the fact that it cannot be fully explained without linking it to teachers’ professional knowledge, practice, and engagement, teachers’ professional identity, and their ethical conduct, all of which are sophisticated constructs in their own right. The complexity of teacher professionalism is also attributed to its evolution within active and learning communities of English language teachers. With this in mind, this chapter begins with a presentation of important definitions of teacher professionalism. This is supported by a brief examination of the professional standards obligatory for the teaching occupation. These are discussed in relation to three dimensions: professional knowledge, professional practice, and professional engagement. The chapter then explicates the construct of teacher professional identity. This is followed by a concise deliberation on the relationship between professionalism and ethics. The chapter concludes with constructive suggestions for sustaining teacher professionalism.

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.