Expertise in Teaching from a Developmental Perspective: The Developmental Teacher Education Program at Berkeley

Expertise in teaching is considered from a constructivist developmental perspective that has been applied both to the teaching of elementary school children and to the preparation of teachers in a two-year graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. The program's goals and practices are discussed with reference to developmental principles which hold that understandings are constructed gradually, through the learner's own activity, within different knowledge domains. Evidence of the program's effectiveness in promoting expertise among student teachers and graduates is summarized in terms of a developmental sequence that teachers appear to go through in attaining constructivist understandings in the domain of pedagogy