Any Good at Another School?

Teachers’ school contexts play critical yet underappreciated roles in their development of instructional practice in individual classrooms. Sparked by insights from Akiko Hayashi’s book Teaching Expertise in Three Countries, this reflective piece explores the author’s development of his craft across four distinctive educational contexts. The author uses the titles his students have called him in each of these settings as springboards for exploring the interactive relationship between teaching and context. The resulting sketches present teaching as a deeply situated enterprise and invite readers to consider context’s pivotal role in understanding and developing teachers’ expertise.