Beyond the Art of Teaching: Making Expert Instructional Judgment Visible
When an adult learner struggles during instruction, the visible error rarely tells the whole story. A missed step, delayed decision, incorrect response, or breakdown under pressure may originate from several different causes. The learner may misunderstand a concept, overlook an important cue, apply the wrong mental model, experience cognitive overload, or simply lack enough practice to perform reliably.
The instructor sees the performance problem, but the more difficult task is determining what produced it.
That distinction matters because different causes require different responses. Additional explanation may help a learner who lacks conceptual understanding but frustrate one who already understands the material and needs an opportunity to practice. Immediate intervention may prevent an error from compounding, but intervening too quickly may also deny the learner an opportunity to recognize and correct the problem independently.
Expert instruction therefore involves more than knowing the subject, presenting information clearly, or following an established lesson plan. It requires instructors to interpret incomplete performance evidence, consider competing explanations, select an intervention, observe the learner’s response, and adjust as the situation develops.
This is instructional judgment, and much of it remains hidden behind what organizations casually call “the art of teaching.”
Experience Does Not Automatically Produce Expertise
Organizations frequently use years of experience as a substitute for demonstrated expertise.
The assumption is understandable. Someone who has instructed for many years has encountered more learners, observed more performance problems, and attempted more interventions than a novice instructor.
Experience creates opportunities to develop expertise, but it does not guarantee that development.
Palmer et al. (2005) found that researchers use multiple indicators when identifying expert teachers, including professional recognition, demonstrated knowledge, teaching performance, and experience. More recent work by Anderson and Taner (2023) similarly describes expert teaching as a multidimensional construct rather than a status earned simply through longevity.
This distinction becomes especially important when examining diagnostic judgment. Kosel et al. (2024) found that experience can improve some aspects of teachers’ diagnostic reasoning, but experience does not consistently ensure accurate judgment. Brunner and Karlen (2026) likewise demonstrated that teacher judgments are influenced by both teacher and learner characteristics.
An instructor can possess extensive content knowledge and still misinterpret why a learner is struggling. Another may recognize the problem accurately but select an intervention that does not match its cause. Expertise is not merely possessing more knowledge. It includes knowing what information matters, interpreting it within the situation, and using that interpretation to guide action.
The practical question is not simply, “How long has this person been teaching?”
A more useful set of questions would be: What does this instructor notice? How does the instructor interpret what is observed? What alternative explanations are considered? Why is one intervention selected instead of another? What causes the instructor to continue, modify, or abandon that response?
Diagnosis and Intervention Are Not Separate Events
Instructional decision-making is often described as a sequence:
Observe a performance problem.
Diagnose its cause.
Select an intervention.
Evaluate the result.
This sequence is useful for explaining the process, but it may not accurately represent how expert instructors work during authentic instructional events.
Scheiner et al. (2026) reconceptualize teacher noticing as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. From this perspective, noticing does not occur solely inside the instructor’s mind before action begins. It develops through interaction with the learner, the task, the environment, available tools, and the consequences of previous instructional decisions.
An instructor may begin intervening before reaching a final diagnosis. The learner’s reaction then provides additional evidence. That evidence may confirm the instructor’s interpretation, reveal that the initial explanation was incomplete, or point toward an entirely different problem.
Diagnosis and intervention therefore overlap.
For example, an instructor who observes hesitation might initially suspect a knowledge deficiency and ask a targeted question. The learner’s answer may reveal that the required knowledge is present, but the learner is attending to the wrong cues. The instructor’s question was an intervention, but the learner’s response also became diagnostic evidence. The instructor must now reinterpret the problem and select a different response.
This is not a failure to follow a process. It is the process.
Expert instructional judgment is often iterative. Instructors notice, interpret, act, observe, and revise, sometimes within seconds. Separating diagnosis from intervention too rigidly can make this work appear cleaner and more predictable than it actually is.
Adaptive Expertise Is More Valuable Than a Universal Checklist
Organizations understandably seek consistency in instruction. Standardization can protect essential content, clarify expectations, and prevent instructors from improvising without sufficient justification. However, consistency should not be confused with requiring every learner to receive the same response.
Adaptive expertise provides a more useful way to understand this balance.
Betinol et al. (2023) connect the development of adaptive expertise with reflection, questioning, and the reconsideration of established assumptions. Adaptive experts can apply reliable practices when familiar solutions are appropriate, but they can also modify those practices when the situation does not fit the expected pattern.
For instructors, this means knowing both how to use an established intervention and when that intervention is unlikely to work. It also means recognizing when a learner’s response requires a change in explanation, pacing, questioning, practice conditions, or feedback.
A checklist can remind an instructor what to consider, but it cannot independently determine what a learner needs. If an instructional framework becomes too prescriptive, it can remove the very judgment it was intended to support.
The goal should not be to convert expert reasoning into a universal decision tree. The goal should be to make that reasoning more visible so developing instructors can learn how experts frame problems, examine evidence, test explanations, and adapt their responses.
Why Authentic Instructional Events Matter
Research on diagnostic reasoning often uses simulations, written cases, video examples, or hypothetical scenarios. These methods can isolate particular variables and allow researchers to compare responses under controlled conditions. Roeben et al. (2025), for example, demonstrate how simulations can support learning to diagnose cognitive engagement in teacher education.
These methods are valuable, but they do not fully reproduce the conditions of live instruction.
During an authentic instructional event, the instructor does not receive a neatly organized description of the problem. Relevant cues must be separated from noise. Decisions may need to be made quickly. The instructor’s intervention changes the situation, and the learner’s response produces new information. Competing instructional goals, time limitations, environmental pressures, and the consequences of allowing an error to continue may all shape the decision.
Studying instructors in these conditions can reveal forms of reasoning that may not appear when experts are asked only what they would do in a hypothetical case or what they remember doing in the past.
Interviews remain important because observable behavior alone cannot explain why an instructor acted. Observation remains equally important because retrospective explanations cannot always reconstruct everything an instructor noticed or considered in the moment.
Combining the two provides a stronger opportunity to examine both instructional practice and the reasoning behind it.
Moving Beyond “Watch Me and Figure It Out”
Many instructor-development programs are effective at teaching content, course standards, administrative requirements, and presentation techniques. They are often less effective at teaching the diagnostic reasoning required when a learner’s difficulty does not have an obvious cause.
Developing instructors may therefore learn through observation, informal mentoring, trial and error, and what is frequently described as experience. They watch accomplished instructors work, imitate visible behaviors, and gradually develop their own approaches.
The problem is that the most important part of expert performance may not be visible.
A developing instructor can observe an expert ask a question but may not understand which performance cue prompted it, what competing explanations were considered, or how the learner’s answer shaped the next decision. Without access to that reasoning, the developing instructor may copy the question without understanding when or why it is useful.
Instructor development should make those decisions discussable.
Instead of only asking, “What did you do?” professional learning should also examine:
What did you notice?
Why did that cue matter?
What did you initially believe was causing the problem?
What other explanations did you consider?
Why did you intervene at that point?
What did the learner’s response tell you?
What caused you to adjust your approach?
Under what conditions would you make a different decision?
These questions do not eliminate the need for experience. They make experience more productive by helping instructors examine and explain what they are learning from it.
Making Expert Judgment Transferable Without Oversimplifying It
Expert instructional judgment may never be fully captured in a manual, checklist, or flowchart. It is contextual, interactive, and influenced by the learner, task, environment, and instructor’s prior experience.
That does not mean it must remain inaccessible.
Research can identify recurring diagnostic cues, common categories of interpretation, patterns in intervention selection, and the conditions that cause instructors to change course. Those findings could inform mentoring conversations, observation guides, instructor-upgrade activities, reflective practice, and scenario-based professional development.
The result should not prescribe a single response to every performance problem. Instead, it should help developing instructors ask better questions, recognize more meaningful evidence, and understand how expert judgment evolves during instruction.
Calling this work “the art of teaching” acknowledges its complexity, but it can also end the conversation too early. If expert instructors are making sophisticated judgments that others need to learn, organizations should do more than admire those judgments from a distance.
They should study them, discuss them, and create deliberate opportunities to develop them.
The objective is not to replace instructional judgment with a process. It is to understand the process already operating within expert judgment and make more of it available to the instructors who come next.
Sources Informing This Article
Anderson, J., & Taner, G. (2023). Building the expert teacher prototype: A metasummary of teacher expertise studies in primary and secondary education. Educational Research Review, 38, Article 100485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2022.100485
Betinol, E., Murphy, S., & Regehr, G. (2023). Exploring the development of adaptive expertise through the lens of threshold concepts. Medical Education, 57(2), 142–150. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.14887
Brunner, S. N., & Karlen, Y. (2026). Teacher judgments of student self-regulated learning: Examining the effect of student and teacher characteristics. Metacognition and Learning, 21, Article 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-026-09469-x
Kosel, C., Bauer, E., & Seidel, T. (2024). Where experience makes a difference: Teachers’ judgment accuracy and diagnostic reasoning regarding student learning characteristics. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1278472. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1278472
Palmer, D. J., Stough, L. M., Burdenski, T. K., Jr., & Gonzales, M. (2005). Identifying teacher expertise: An examination of researchers’ decision making. Educational Psychologist, 40(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4001_2
Roeben, M., Vejvoda, J., Murböck, J., Fischer, F., Schultz-Pernice, F., Lohr, A., Stadler, M., Sailer, M., & Heitzmann, N. (2025). Simulations in teacher education: Learning to diagnose cognitive engagement. Education Sciences, 15(3), Article 261. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15030261
Scheiner, T., Aspbury-Miyanishi, E., & Jazby, D. (2026). Beyond traditional cognitivist boundaries: Reconceptualizing teacher noticing through 4E cognition. Teaching and Teacher Education, 180, Article 105606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2026.105606
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