This paper attempts to identify the distinctive qualities of successful veteran teachers, referred to as "expert teachers", which separates them not only from novice teachers but more importantly from experienced non-expert teachers. Based on earlier case studies, this paper maintains that the critical differences between expert and non-expert teachers are manifested in three dimensions: their ability to integrate aspects of teacher knowledge in relation to the teaching act; their response to their contexts of work, and their ability to engage in reflection and conscious deliberation. The paper further addresses the question of why some teachers become experts while others remain experienced non-experts by examining the developmental processes of the experienced teachers in the case studies. The findings suggest that engagement in exploration and experimentation in teaching and learning, in problematizing the unproblematic, and in tasks which challenge teachers to extend their competence are crucial to the development of expertise. The implications for teacher development are discussed.
[Copyright of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13540600903057179]

As learning technologies increasingly facilitate the internationalisation of subject offerings, it becomes correspondingly important to try and ensure that the needs of diverse student groups are met, and to provide for ongoing improvement of their learning experiences. A variety of evaluation procedures is valuable in this respect, but particularly those that illuminate these experiences. This kind of information provides a rich source of data for teachers to use as a basis for reflective practice to inform the continuing refinement of teaching and learning approaches, and curriculum development. The nature of reflective practice also allows for its inclusion in the students' learning processes, thus simultaneously providing a means for improving the quality of their learning and contributing to their future professional lives, whilst offering a further set of perspectives to inform subject development.
This paper describes the use of reflective practice as a practical means of converging a range of non-positivist approaches to inform the teaching of a core undergraduate accounting subject; offered in Australia to on-campus students, distance education students and Victorian Year 13 school students, as well as to overseas students in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. It also shows that demands by the accounting profession for universities to improve learning to cope with the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent within professional life can be met, in part, by reflective practice.
[Copyright of Australian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) at http://www.ascilite.org.au]

This paper discusses the views of three Hong Kong social work practitioners on how they make sense of what they learned at university and how they reconstruct that social work knowledge through reflection on their practice. It suggests that unreflective and uncritical discretion results in social workers making assumptions or imposing their own beliefs, which inhibits their practice. Three issues that are commonly faced by fresh graduates are highlighted in the critical reflections of the three social work practitioners: (1) value conflict; (2) unawareness of the self; and (3) abuse of power in practice. In 2007, the competency-based approach is still the mainstream approach to social work education in Hong Kong, but as social work educators we should aim to help students to engage in a process of continuous professional reflection whereby they explore multiple ways of framing and understanding a practice situation and hence find alternative ways of knowing and acting in practice.
[Copyright of Social Work Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02615470701456558]