This research is Berliner's summary of what he found while searching for expert pedagogues or school teachers. It includes a through review of what the field literature says about expert pedagogues. Berliner's research strategy was to study the routines of expert teachers vs. novice teachers to observe and understand how their behaviors differ. Specifically, his research utilized observational and correlational data measures which determined that teachers who began their mathematics classes with an opening homework review showed to be higher effective teaching achievement.

Methodological problems relating to this kind of research include:

1. the defining of criteria to use to describe experts,
2. the difficulty differentiating between experienced and expert in pedagogy, and
3. the problem of stipulating which knowledge domains should be used to measure expertise.

Through the micro-analysis of an opening homework review task performed with expert and novice teachers, Berliner is able to illustrate some very interesting points about experts' internal schemata. Pedagogical experts seem to differ from non-experts in the following respects:

1. Experts have more developed practical knowledge.
2. Experts have more developed internal schemata for teaching. To illustrate this point, Berliner (1986) found that when teachers were provided with student information cards, expert teachers paid very little attention to the cards and yet had a very clear picture of what knowledge and skills they could expect from the students when they entered the classroom.
3. Experts make more inferences while non-experts views problems more literally. Berliner (1986) used slides to illustrate how experts will view a slide and make very acute and intuitive statements about what is happening in the classroom, however, non-experts would literally just describe the setting.
4. Experts classify teaching problems based on deeper structures rather than surface structures.
5. Experts are quicker to recognize and identify patterns.
6. Experts can represent problems and solve them using more sophisticated strategies. For example, experts will spend more time examining a problem, building a mental model, and mentally working through the initial stages of strategy planning than will a novice.
7. Experts are more opportunistic planners.
8. Experts have better planning and time management meta-cognitive and self-regulatory practices. In the classroom, this translates into a better learning environment for the students with an expert whose instructional strategies are said to fail 1 out of every 5 tries. If Berliner's (1986) statistic of a novice teacher's lesson plan failing at a rate of 1 out of 10 trials, then the adaptability of an expert teacher could translate into a more productive learning environment for the students.

The value of this type of research is in its potential as a tool to promote growth in non-experts. If we can prepare a mental model of how experts perform then we could present this model to novices and train them to act more expert-like. The issue here is how much time does it take to become an expert (10 years?), and can we actually utilize a short-cut for this process?