{"id":7770,"date":"2024-09-22T08:00:05","date_gmt":"2024-09-22T13:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=7770"},"modified":"2024-09-05T09:31:19","modified_gmt":"2024-09-05T14:31:19","slug":"experts-expertise-and-teachers-and-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/experts-expertise-and-teachers-and-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts, Expertise, and Teachers (and Students!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers often focus on experts<\/strong> and expertise<\/strong>. And bloggers like me often follow their leads.<\/p>\n

You’ll read about the novice-expert continuum, the differences<\/a> between novices and experts, and the expertise-reversal effect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

But let’s pause for a minute and ask: what is an expert? What is this “expertise” that novices gradually acquire on their way to becoming an expert?<\/p>\n

A recent book by Roger Kneebone — Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery\u00a0<\/em>—\u00a0takes on these fascinating questions.<\/p>\n

Biography, and Beyond<\/h2>\n

Kneebone himself followed an unusual trajectory to this set of questions. He started his professional life training to be a surgeon; his stories of emergency surgery in South Africa will set the squeamish on edge.<\/p>\n

By the way, while not slicing his way through gory neck wounds, Kneebone also spent time learning how to fly at a local airport. Here again, his mishaps as a pilot provide important examples for his investigation of expertise.<\/p>\n

After some number of years as a surgeon, he decided to retool himself as a general practitioner in rural England — the kind of doctor we would now call a “primary care provider.”<\/p>\n

That is: instead of snipping gall bladders out of patients he barely knows, he discusses hang-nails with patients he’s know for years.<\/p>\n

Oh, by the way, he also takes up playing the harpsichord — he even builds one of his own. You guessed it: this pursuit also informs his book.<\/p>\n

He finally ends up with yet another career: he helped found a program for training surgeons.\u00a0He is — rather curiously — an expert in expertise.<\/p>\n

Sample Size<\/h2>\n

To explore the nature of expertise, Kneebone reaches outside his own experience to talk to a remarkable variety of experts. As in:<\/p>\n

An expert taxidermist<\/p>\n

An expert tailor<\/p>\n

An expert harpsichord maker<\/p>\n

An expert magician<\/p>\n

An expert fighter pilot<\/p>\n

An expert ceramicist<\/p>\n

And so forth.<\/p>\n

In these conversations, Kneebone finds remarkably consistent patterns. That is: the path to becoming an expert surgeon is surprisingly like the path to being an expert tailor or an expert magician — even though the actual work of these professions differs substantially.<\/p>\n

In his book, he maps out this path, using examples and stories from all those professions.<\/p>\n

I won’t trace the entire path from “apprentice” to “journeyman*” to “master*” — you should read Kneebone’s book if you want the details, but I do want to share a few of his insights.<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>, Kneebone sees the phase transition from apprentice to journeyman as a change in focus. An apprentice teacher (for example) focuses on\u00a0what s\/he is doing<\/em>: what does my<\/strong> lesson plan look like? Am I<\/strong> covering learning objectives?<\/p>\n

A journeyman teacher focuses on\u00a0the effect of those actions on students<\/em>.\u00a0Are they<\/strong> learning? Did they<\/strong> understand that example? How do their<\/strong> mistakes this week compare to their mistakes last week?<\/p>\n

As a developing teacher, I can’t do the second part (focusing on students) until I’ve made the first part (focusing on myself) routine. But that switch really makes all that initial work worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Second:<\/strong> the phase change from journeyman to mastery — if I’m understanding Kneebone correctly — involves\u00a0another such change in focus. Journeyman teachers focus on their students. Master teachers focus on helping other teachers help their students. They switch to a meta-level, and think about the profession itself: how to pass on — and improve! — professional skills, norms, and knowledge.<\/p>\n

Once again, this journeyman-to-mastery switch can’t happen until after MANY years of journeyman-level effort. And, in fact, lots of people never make this second leap: they stay focused on the proximate, not the ultimate, effects of their work.<\/p>\n

If you’ve been teaching for a while, perhaps you can see these steps in your work, and your colleagues’. Certainly I can see that progression in the schools where I have worked.<\/p>\n

Teaching Implications<\/h2>\n

As teachers, we’re understandably tempted to ask: “How should I think about helping my students<\/em> along\u00a0this path? How can I help my students arrive at expertise?”<\/p>\n

Kneebone doesn’t address this question directly, but I suspect I know part of the answer.<\/p>\n

In Kneebone’s model, the path from apprentice to journeyman to mastery takes…literally…years. Probably decades.<\/p>\n

Kneebone doesn’t object to repetitive drudgery; in fact, he considers it an essential step in the process of developing mastery.<\/p>\n

For instance: the master tailor he interviews spent literally months sewing a specialized part of a pocket…over and over (and over) again. While he was doing so, he often felt irritated and confused — all too aware of the seeming pointlessness of the exercise. Only once he’d travelled further along the path did he recognize all the subtleties he had absorbed along the way.<\/p>\n

So, I suspect Kneebone would tell me: “Andrew, get real. Your high-school sophomores will not become experts at writing — or Shakespeare, or grammar — in a year. Becoming an expert in Shakespeare — in anything<\/em> —\u00a0takes DECADES.”<\/p>\n

Instead, I found Kneebone’s book to be most helpful as we think about teacher training: how we can reasonably expect apprentices in our profession explore and sift their experiences on their way to later stages of expertise.<\/p>\n

A Final Distinction<\/h2>\n

While I think Kneebone’s book gives better guidance for training teachers (over several years) than teaching students (over several months), I do think the terms “novice” and “expert” are useful in understanding our day-to-day classroom work.<\/p>\n

Specifically, we should be aware that our students (almost always) know much less than we do about the topic we’re teaching; they are, relatively speaking, “novices.” We should not act as if they’re experts; doing so will almost certainly overwhelm their working memory.<\/p>\n

And, we should not abandon “expertise” as a goal — as long as we focus on “relative\u00a0<\/em>expertise.”<\/p>\n

That is: my sophomores won’t be Shakespeare experts at the end of the year. But — if I’m doing my job right — they will have\u00a0more\u00a0<\/em>expertise than they did before.<\/p>\n

They’re better at parsing Shakespearean syntax.<\/p>\n

They know more about King James I’s obsession with witches, and with deception. (Hello, Gunpowder Plot.)<\/p>\n

They’re on the lookout for the words “do,” “done,” and “deed” as they make their way through the poetry.<\/p>\n

They’re not experts,<\/em> but they’re\u00a0relative<\/em> experts: that is, experts relative to themselves at the beginning of the year.<\/p>\n

As long as we keep the goal of “relative” expertise in mind, then the novice\/expert distinction provides lots of useful guidance for our work with students.<\/p>\n

As long as we\u00a0recognize that Kneebone’s insights apply more to\u00a0teaching training<\/em> than to\u00a0student instruction<\/em>, I think his book provides importand and helpful insights into the nuances, trials, and joys of our work.<\/p>\n

\n

* These terms, of course, raise questions. Kneebone considers them, and sticks with this terminology.<\/p>\n

\n

Kneebone, R. (2020).\u00a0Expert: Understanding the path to mastery<\/i>. Penguin UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Researchers often focus on experts and expertise. And bloggers like me often follow their leads. You’ll read about the novice-expert continuum, the differences between novices and experts, and the expertise-reversal effect. But let’s pause for a minute and ask: what is an expert? What is this “expertise” that novices gradually acquire on their way to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-7770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-lb-blog","tag-experts-and-novices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7770"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7798,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7770\/revisions\/7798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}