When Teacher Expertise Becomes Classroom Content for Children

Not everything teachers need to know about reading needs to be explicitly taught to children.

In recent years, teachers have learned more about reading than ever before. Concepts such as Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the Simple View of Reading, orthographic mapping, and the cognitive processes involved in learning to read are now widely discussed amongst teachers in staff rooms and at staff meetings.

This growing knowledge base is enormously valuable. For many teachers, it has been both empowering and long overdue. Teaching reading is one of the most complex and consequential tasks in primary education, however, for many years teachers were expected to teach it without ever really understanding how reading itself actually works.

But this expanding understanding also raises an important question.

Does everything teachers need to know about reading need to be taught to children?

The knowledge that teachers require in order to teach reading effectively is often far more complex than the knowledge children need in order to become readers. When that distinction becomes blurred, classrooms can unintentionally shift from teaching children to read to teaching them about reading.

It is an understandable confusion. When something feels important for us to understand as professionals, it can feel equally important that our pupils understand it too. The issue is not whether teachers should understand this knowledge. They absolutely should. The challenge lies in deciding which parts of that knowledge children need to know and which parts should remain part of the teacher’s professional expertise.

Perhaps the easiest way to think about this distinction is to step out of the classroom for a moment and into a kitchen.

The Master Chef and the First Batch of Cookies

Imagine a master chef teaching a child how to bake their first batch of cookies.

To reach that level of expertise, the chef has spent years learning the science of cooking. They understand emulsions, fermentation, gluten development, and the chemical reactions that occur when heat transforms dough into something golden and crisp.

But when the child walks into the kitchen, the chef does not begin with a lecture on molecular gastronomy. Instead, the instructions are simple and purposeful. Measure the flour. Stir the mixture. Put the tray into the oven and watch the edges as they begin to brown.

A master chef’s deep knowledge remains present, of course. It allows them to recognise when the dough needs more flour or when the oven temperature requires adjusting, quietly shaping each decision along the way. The child, however, never needs to see that complexity. The chef’s expertise is not there to explain the chemistry of baking but to make the baking possible. After all, the aim is not to deliver a lesson in culinary science; it is simply to bake a cookie.

The same principle applies to reading instruction.

The knowledge that teachers need in order to teach reading effectively is often far more complex than the knowledge children need in order to become readers. Good teaching depends on recognising that difference and realising that not everything teachers know needs to become part of classroom instruction.

Teacher Professional Knowledge

To teach reading effectively, teachers require a deep understanding of language and literacy development. This includes knowledge of how phonemes relate to graphemes, why certain spelling patterns appear across words, and how readers gradually store words in memory through processes such as orthographic mapping.

Teachers also benefit from understanding how children learn patterns in print. Research suggests that once children possess a basic foundation in letter–sound correspondences and blending, each successful attempt at decoding strengthens their ability to recognise words in the future. This idea, known as the Self-Teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995), highlights how reading itself becomes a powerful teacher.

This kind of professional knowledge enables teachers to interpret what they see in the classroom and respond to children’s difficulties with greater precision. When a child struggles with the word ship, for example, an experienced teacher may begin considering several possibilities: can the child hear the individual sounds, do they recognise that sh represents a single sound, and are they able to blend those sounds together to form the word?

Such knowledge allows teachers to diagnose reading difficulties thoughtfully and to adjust instruction accordingly. Yet an important question remains: does the child need to understand all of this in order to read successfully?

In most cases, the answer is no—particularly for young children in the early stages of learning to read. At this stage, what children need most are clear explanations, consistent practice, and opportunities to apply the alphabetic code as they encounter words in print.

When Expertise Becomes Overload: The Case of Syllable Types

One of the clearest examples of the tension between teacher knowledge and classroom instruction can be seen in the teaching of the six syllable types: closed, open, vowel-consonant-e, vowel team, r-controlled, and consonant-le.

For teachers, these categories can be extremely helpful. They provide an understanding for why vowels behave differently across words and help explain spelling patterns that might otherwise appear inconsistent or confusing. From a professional perspective, this knowledge deepens our understanding of how English works and can be particularly useful when supporting individual children who are struggling with specific word patterns.

However, knowledge that helps teachers understand language is not always the same as strategies that help children learn to read. In some classrooms, this knowledge moves directly into instruction. Teachers may spend several weeks introducing each syllable type through explicit whole-class lessons, often supported by anchor charts, definitions, rules, and worksheets where children identify and label different syllable patterns.

The intention behind this approach is entirely understandable. Teachers want to equip children with tools to make sense of the structure of words. Yet it is worth pausing to consider what this instruction is actually developing. When children spend extended periods classifying syllables, circling vowel teams, and memorising labels such as VCe or r-controlled, the focus can subtly shift away from the act of reading itself. This naturally raises another question: could this instruction actually be slowing down the reading process?

Every week spent learning the terminology of syllable types is a week that might otherwise be spent reading more words, encountering spelling patterns in meaningful contexts, and strengthening the processes that support fluent word recognition.

None of this suggests that teachers should not understand syllable structures. On the contrary, this knowledge can be extremely helpful when a particular child encounters difficulty and needs a clearer explanation of why a word behaves the way it does.

Interestingly, this same knowledge also helps explain how skilled readers solve unfamiliar words. Research on Set for Variability suggests that readers often adjust their pronunciation of a word when their first decoding attempt does not quite match a real word they recognise. A child might initially decode the word paper with a short vowel sound and then adjust it to /pā-per/ once the word becomes familiar.

From a teacher’s perspective, understanding syllable patterns and broader orthographic structures helps explain why these adjustments occur and allows teachers to anticipate where children might need support.

Rather than explaining the classification of syllables, a teacher might simply prompt the child:

Try the vowel sound. If it doesn’t make a real word, flip it.

Behind that small piece of advice sits a considerable amount of linguistic knowledge. Teachers may understand syllable structures, vowel patterns, and orthographic conventions, but the child does not need the entire knowledge base in order to apply the strategy successfully.

Returning to the kitchen analogy, it would be a little like asking a child to explain the chemical structure of baking powder before allowing them to mix it into the batter. The chef may find the science fascinating and incredibly useful, but the child simply wants to bake the cookie.

The challenge for teachers, then, is not simply learning more about reading. It is deciding which parts of that knowledge belong in our teaching and which parts should remain quietly in the background of our professional expertise.

Explicit Instruction Still Matters

None of this should be interpreted as a move away from explicit instruction. In fact, the opposite is true. Effective reading instruction remains explicit, systematic, and focused on teaching the alphabetic code so that children are never left guessing how print represents language.

The distinction being made here is not between explicit teaching and implicit learning. Rather, it is between teaching children how to read words and teaching them the linguistic terminology that helps teachers understand the system.

Children need to be taught clearly and directly how letters represent sounds, how to blend those sounds into words, and how to adjust their pronunciation when a word does not sound quite right. What they do not necessarily need is a detailed taxonomy of syllable types in order to apply those strategies successfully.

In other words, the goal of explicit instruction is to help children perform the actions that skilled readers use rather than requiring them to define the linguistic concepts that sit behind those actions.

When Professional Knowledge Disappears into Clarity

One of the most interesting paradoxes in reading instruction is that the more a teacher understands about reading, the less visible that knowledge often becomes in the classroom.

As the previous example illustrates, the teacher may hold a great deal of linguistic knowledge about syllable structures, orthographic patterns, and decoding processes. Yet in practice, that knowledge often appears in the form of a simple prompt or well-timed piece of guidance.

In expert hands, the knowledge disappears into clarity.

This means that the teacher is working constantly behind the scenes, shaping lesson design, informing the feedback they give in an instructional moment, and guiding decisions about what to introduce next or when to revisit a concept that has not quite stuck. From the child’s perspective, the experience feels far simpler. They are not encountering discussions about orthographic representations or phonological processing. Instead, they hear instructions that make sense to them:

Say the sounds.
Blend them together.
Try that vowel again.
Does that make a real word?

This ability to translate complex knowledge into clear and manageable instruction is one of the defining features of effective teaching.

When Knowledge Clarifies Instruction

The Science of Reading has greatly strengthened teachers’ understanding of literacy, and that is something worth celebrating. But the purpose of teacher knowledge is not to make classrooms more technical but to make learning clearer.

Just as the master chef relies on years of culinary knowledge while teaching a child to bake simple cookies, teachers draw on their expertise to design reading lessons that feel manageable and purposeful.

In the same way, teachers may understand the complexities of syllable structures, orthographic patterns, and linguistic theory. Yet the child sitting beside them with a book does not need that complexity. What they need are clear explanations, meaningful practice, and the growing confidence that comes from recognising words on the page.

The more teachers understand about reading, the more carefully they must decide which parts of that knowledge belong in instruction and which parts should remain quietly in the background of their professional expertise.

When that balance is right, children rarely see the machinery behind the teaching that makes reading possible.