Expertise: The Best Professional Investment You Can Make

Dear colleague,

The most resilient thing you can build for yourself as a professional educator isn't a beautiful classroom (those can get reassigned) or an iron-clad curriculum (we've seen how quickly the winds of policy can reduce these to rubble) or a foolproof methodology (looking at you, AI).

Nope. The most resilient thing is expertise.

First, you reduce education down to its essential goal, its enduring Everest: the promotion of the long-term flourishing of young people through the means of teaching them to master things. This part is critical — if you don't bring your mind back to this, again and again, you'll get frustrated by the ever-present winds of change. Long-term flourishing by way of mastery is the immovable mountain in my sights, and anything that comes to distract me from it is cloud cover. Sometimes, the clouds are harmless wisps; other times, they foretell storms that I'll need to understand if I'm to make a safe ascent.

At the end of the day, it's not “all about the kids” — it's both narrower and broader than that. Narrower in the sense that it's all about advancing the long-term flourishing of young people by teaching them toward mastery. Broader in that to achieve the goal, I need to attend not just to their long-term flourishing but also to mine. This is the essential work of teaching, and it always will be.

Second, you start asking the next obvious questions: how can classes or schools or grade levels like mine best support the long-term flourishing via growth toward mastery of young people? All answers must be tested. These are the places to be rigorous. If we rush into answers, we waste time and frustrate ourselves.

For those answers, we must grow intimately acquainted with the positive and negative sides of any attempt at promoting the long-term flourishing of kids. Choice-based reading? Then how will we give our students shared knowledge? Teacher-selected reading? Then how will we help all students care about the text?

Over time, you identify a few key answers to the question of long-term flourishing in our setting, and you resolve to dig deeper and deeper into them, year after year.

Back in 2014 or so, I decided that my time as a teacher was best spent figuring out how to get my students growing as much as possible through six fundamental areas of practice:

• The Five Key Beliefs (i.e., student motivation)
• Knowledge-building
• Argument
• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking/listening

What I like about this list is that it's manageable. I don't need to blow things up to get better at any of these. I can weave this stuff in to any subject, any curriculum, any setting.

And I also appreciate that, over a decade later, I'm still learning loads each year about how they work, how to improve, how to be more productive and humane.

My career has basically been a pursuit of expertise in those six interrelated areas. And it's been the best investment I can imagine having made in my development as a teacher.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR