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Teachers' work and professional knowledge glossary
31 terms from C05, Teachers' work and professional knowledge — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C05 · Teaching and learning
Teachers' work and professional knowledge
“Teachers resist technology.”
Every term below is defined in the words of teachers' work and professional knowledge, primer C05 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 3 terms are also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
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| A | |||
| Adaptive expertise | Expertise that stays flexible and can deal with unfamiliar problems. Hatano and Inagaki (1986) contrast it with routine expertise, which is fast and accurate in stable conditions but struggles when they change. |
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| Apprenticeship of observation | Lortie's (1975) term for the thousands of hours future teachers spend watching teachers as students. What it teaches is intuitive and imitative, which can make early teaching echo how one was taught (Mewborn & Tyminski, 2006). |
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| Autonomy | The room teachers have to decide what and how to teach. It is a condition for professional judgement, and varies widely between systems and schools. |
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| B | |||
| Burnout | A prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stress at work, marked by exhaustion, cynicism and a sense of ineffectiveness (Maslach et al., 2001). | ||
| C | |||
| Career tracks | Structured routes for professional progression. Singapore's Ministry of Education offers teaching, school leadership and senior specialist tracks, with movement between them (Ministry of Education, n.d.). |
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| Content knowledge | A teacher's knowledge of the subject itself, including why its claims hold and how the discipline is organised, not only its facts (Shulman, 1986). |
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| Craft and tacit knowledge | Practical know-how built through experience that teachers use without always being able to state it, such as sensing when a class is losing the thread. Much of an expert's knowledge is of this kind. |
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| Curricular knowledge | Knowledge of the programmes and materials available for teaching a topic, and of when each suits (Shulman, 1986). It includes what students learnt before and will learn next. | ||
| D | |||
| Decision density | How many judgements teaching requires in a given time. Classic studies describe a very high rate of interaction and interactive decisions (Jackson, 1968; Clark & Peterson, 1986); the popular figure of 1,500 decisions a day has no traceable source. |
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| F | |||
| First- and second-order barriers | First-order barriers are the external and institutional conditions around a teacher, such as access, time and training; second-order barriers are internal and personal, rooted in beliefs about teaching (Ertmer, 1999). |
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| I | |||
| Interconnected model of professional growth | A model of teacher growth with four domains: external information and support, personal knowledge and beliefs, practice, and consequence. Change moves between them through enactment and reflection, along many pathways (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002). |
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| K | |||
| Knowledge base for teaching | Shulman's seven kinds of teacher knowledge: content, general pedagogy, curriculum, pedagogical content knowledge, learners, educational contexts, and educational ends, purposes and values (Shulman, 1987). |
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| L | |||
| Lesson planning | Preparing the aims, activities, materials and checks for a lesson. TALIS 2024 found Singapore lower secondary teachers spend 8.2 hours a week preparing lessons (OECD, 2025). |
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| M | |||
| Mathematical knowledge for teaching | The specialised content knowledge that teaching mathematics requires. First and third grade teachers' scores on it were significantly related to their students' achievement gains (Hill et al., 2005). |
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| P | |||
| Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) | The knowledge that makes a subject teachable: useful representations and examples, and what makes a topic easy or hard for particular learners (Shulman, 1986). Shulman (1987) called it a "special amalgam of content and pedagogy". C12 The knowledge of how to represent and teach a particular subject to particular learners (Shulman, 1986). Its home in this series is C05, which covers it and TPACK in depth. |
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| Pre-service and in-service teacher education | Pre-service education prepares people before they teach; in-service education, often called professional development or professional learning, continues it during a career. In Singapore, the National Institute of Education provides initial teacher preparation (Low, 2024). |
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| Professional judgement | Deciding well in situations that rules and scripts do not fully cover, drawing on knowledge, experience and the aims of education. Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) call the capacity for it decisional capital. |
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| R | |||
| Reflective practice | Learning from one's own practice by thinking about it during and after the event. Schön (1983) described reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action as how professionals handle situations that theory does not settle. |
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| Relational trust | The trust among teachers, leaders, parents and students that makes shared improvement possible. See primer C15, How schools work. C15 Trust between people in roles, grounded in "respect, personal regard, competence in core role responsibilities, and personal integrity" (Bryk & Schneider, 2003). It is a working condition rather than a mood. |
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| Returns to teaching experience | The gains in effectiveness that come with experience: fastest early, continuing throughout a teacher's career, and larger in schools with supportive professional environments (Kraft & Papay, 2014). |
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| S | |||
| SAMR model | Puentedura's four-level ladder that sorts uses of technology into substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition. Critics note little peer-reviewed basis, missing context and a false implication that higher is better (Hamilton et al., 2016). |
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| Stages of teaching expertise | Berliner's five stages, adapted from the Dreyfus model of skill: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert. Competence is a realistic goal for most teachers; expertise is achieved by few (Berliner, 1988). |
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| T | |||
| Teacher agency | Teachers acting with judgement to shape their work. In the ecological view, it is something teachers achieve in particular settings, not a fixed trait (Biesta et al., 2015; Priestley et al., 2015). C11 Something teachers achieve in a setting rather than a matter of permission alone, shaped by what they bring, what the culture allows and what the structures make possible (Priestley et al., 2015). |
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| Teacher beliefs | Teachers' views about learning, teaching, students and subjects. They shape practice and are shaped by it, and they can act as second-order barriers to change (Ertmer, 1999). |
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| Teacher career cycle | Huberman's account of a teaching career, from survival and discovery through stabilisation, experimentation or reassessment, and later serenity or conservatism, to disengagement, with the caution that careers do not follow one path (Huberman, 1989). |
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| Teacher collaboration | Teachers working together, from sharing materials to team teaching and joint professional learning. Supportive, collegial environments are linked to faster improvement (Kraft & Papay, 2014). |
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| Teacher efficacy | A teacher's belief in their capacity to bring about learning. Self-efficacy with a tool is one of the variables in technology change (Ertmer & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2010). |
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| Teacher identity | How teachers understand themselves as professionals: what kind of teacher they are and want to be. Changes that seem to question that identity tend to meet stronger doubts. |
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| TPACK | Technological pedagogical content knowledge: the knowledge of how technology, pedagogy and content fit together in a particular context (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). |
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| U | |||
| Unit and scheme of work | A plan for a sequence of lessons, from a unit of a few weeks to a scheme covering a term or year. It is where curricular knowledge becomes a teaching order. |
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| W | |||
| Workload | The hours and tasks that teaching involves, including teaching, preparation, marking, administration and duties. TALIS 2024 found Singapore lower secondary teachers report 47.3 hours a week, against an OECD average of 41 (OECD, 2025). |
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