OISE alumna Nidhi Sachdeva pens new book on teacher training
Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva first conceived the idea for her new book while preparing a presentation for teachers in 2024.
Well before the release of her new book, Becoming an Expert Teacher: Deliberate Practice for Effective Teaching, co-authored with her research colleague Dr. Paul Kirschner (Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology at Open University, Netherlands), she met with Kim Langen, the leader of Spirit of Math – a Canadian organization – and asked her about something she had been working on with her teachers but was still struggling to address.
“She shared something that really stayed with me,” Sachdeva recalls. “She said, ‘I visit many classrooms every week. I sit, I observe, and much of what I see is incredible. But sometimes I'll see a teacher explain something, most students seem to have understood it, but perhaps two students sitting in that same class haven't. The teacher moves on, quite likely because she's noticed the hands that went up rather than those that didn't, or those who didn't feel comfortable demonstrating that they hadn't understood.’”
Sachdeva found this troubling. She told the leader that what she described was one of the many things that cognitive science and research on teaching expertise could help us understand.
“Expert teachers (I prefer this term to ‘master teachers’) are particularly good at noticing these things and making instructional decisions in response,” she said.
And just like that, her presentation became about one central question: “What is an expert teacher, and how do you spot one?”
This informative book, published in September, distills evidence-informed principles of effective instruction into clear, actionable insights while motivating teachers to commit to the science and craft of expertise.
Why now?
For Sachdeva, the timing of this conversation is incredibly important.
“We're facing some real challenges with declining student learning outcomes, reading skills, and numeracy skills, not just in Canada but in many parts of the world,” she said.
Many factors have contributed to these declines – tech screens, generative AI, the COVID pandemic. Decades of research have established that teachers are among the most significant school-based influences on student learning. “In fact,” she says, “research suggests that the influence of an effective teacher can continue to be felt three years after a student has left their classroom.”
This matters even more because the quality of teaching in publicly-funded education is especially consequential for children who have the least access to educational resources and opportunities outside school, she says. “For children whose families can afford tutoring, enrichment, books, and all kinds of additional support, gaps in classroom instruction can sometimes be compensated for. But what about the child who has none of that? It’s a real equity issue.”
For that child, the quality of teaching they receive is not a small matter. It can fundamentally change their educational trajectory. Kirschner and Sachdeva explore this issue at length in their book. “And believe me when I say this, we don't spend nearly enough time discussing teaching expertise. This matters because we cannot develop what we cannot name,” she said.
The book's intentions and takeaways
The authors wanted to shift the discussion from good teaching to great or successful teaching, particularly in terms of a student’s overall growth in life, and move away from vague descriptions toward something more concrete, grounded in research and useful to teachers and education systems.
“We often describe great teachers in almost romantic terms,” she said.
One of the book’s central arguments, Sachdeva explains, is that expertise is developed, not simply acquired through the passage of time.
“A teacher with 20 years of experience is not necessarily an expert teacher. That is not to diminish experience, which is enormously valuable, but experience alone doesn't guarantee improvement,” says Sachdeva.
The authors also wanted to challenge the rather unhelpful divide between teaching as an art and teaching as a science. “I've always found that distinction a little frustrating. Teaching absolutely involves craft, judgment, sensitivity to context, knowing when to do what. But that craft needs to be informed by a strong scientific foundation – much like in medicine,” she says.
Teachers need an understanding of how people actually learn. The science, Sachdeva says, tells us about the principles of learning and effective instruction, while the craft is how that knowledge is used intelligently in real classrooms, with real students, in real time.
“We mention a classic study in the book that talks about how teachers make 1200 – 1500 spontaneous decisions every day – shouldn’t some or most of those decisions be evidence-informed for the sake of student learning? This is something I think about all the time.”
“I hope readers come away with a different way of thinking about their own professional growth,” she adds. “Whether you're a new teacher or you've been teaching for 25 years, the question isn't simply how much experience you have accumulated, but what you are doing with that experience.”
To wrap our conversation with Dr. Sachdeva, we asked her to reflect on what it means to publish in this way for public consumption. Here is her response.
This one is quite personal for me, because when I first started exploring this question back in 2024, I certainly wasn't imagining that it would become a book, much less one I'd write with Paul Kirschner.
I had admired Paul's scholarship for years. His work on cognitive science and instructional design has shaped much of my own thinking and teaching. So the opportunity to write alongside someone whose work I had learned so much from was quite extraordinary. And I'll say that the process of writing together was itself a tremendous learning experience. We challenged each other's thinking, debated ideas, worked through disagreements, and tried very hard to make sure that what we were saying was both scientifically defensible and genuinely useful to teachers and systems.
I think publishing a book like this also comes with a particular responsibility. It's one thing to write for an academic audience where readers share much of your disciplinary language and background. It's quite another to take decades of research across several fields and make it accessible, meaningful, and useful to people who are doing the incredibly complex work of teaching every day. And that's what I'm most proud of. We didn't want to write something that simply demonstrates how much research we know. We wanted to write something that respects the intelligence of teachers, respects the complexity of their work, and offers them something that can genuinely help. It’s not written as “here’s one more thing for teachers to do.” Instead, we tried to write it as here’s what teachers deserve to know and practice to be able to do this complex job better – always in service on student learning.
As someone who works at the intersection of research and practice, this has always been important to me. I get frustrated when valuable research stays within academic journals, behind paywalls, or within conversations that practising teachers rarely get to be part of. For decades, we have accumulated such a rich body of knowledge about learning and instruction, and yet far too much of it remains disconnected from everyday classroom practice.
I've spent last five years trying to bridge that gap through my writing, my teaching, and my work with educators. This book feels like a natural extension of that work, although certainly on a different scale.
The last thing I want is for anyone to read this as another demand being placed on them, another way of saying they're not doing enough. Quite the opposite. I think teachers deserve access to the very best knowledge we have about their profession. They deserve opportunities to develop expertise throughout their careers. And they deserve systems that take their professional growth seriously. A coherent system is what will truly help teachers thrive in this role. One of our endorsers, Barbara Oakley said it nicely, “Every teacher deserves this book. More importantly, every student does.”
If there's one thought I'd like readers to take away, it's that great teaching should not be something we simply hope to encounter, or something we attribute to the exceptional talents of a few individuals. We should understand how it develops and be much more intentional about making it possible. We do this and rejoice over such expertise in other professions – why not teaching?
Because ultimately, this book may be about teachers, but the reason I care so deeply about the subject is the students. For me, it has always been about the students.