Expert versus Novice

When I started my fall placement I thought my mentor teacher was a genius.  He had so much information in his head and was so quickly able to pull facts relating to the content, the teaching pedagogy, the class, and the individual students.  He saw trends in student behavior and scores without even looking in his grade book.  One day he taught a lesson, modified it slightly for the next class, then skipped a whole portion and modified it drastically for the third class.  We were teaching in a departmentalized fifth grade, which gave me the opportunity to observe or teach the same lesson three times in a row and learn from each one.  I asked him why he had modified the lesson so much for the third class and he said, "They were just off today.  I could tell from the moment they walked into the room."  I, on the other hand, could not tell at all.  By the end of the class period I could definitely see it, but not at the beginning.  I was also unable to keep all the information in my head and resorted to many, many notes.  I sometimes wondered if I had brainpower to be a teacher and keep track of so much information, a problem I had never had in my previous careers. 

When I started my second placement I was again impressed with how much information the teacher seemed to have in her head, but I also noticed that I felt a little more confident and able to hold some of the same information.  Like maybe, given time, I too could manage it all.

Recently I started reading How People Learn, by the National Research Council, and it's all starting to make sense.  One of the chapters talks about experts versus novices and the different ways they attain, process, and retain knowledge.  They say that experts are able to see meaningful patterns in information and are able to organize knowledge into "big ideas" for more efficient storage.  Novices, on the other hand, don't have the background knowledge yet to see meaningful patterns, so novices are simply trying to retain all information with no meaningful way to store it.  Chris Jernstedt, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, agreed, saying "the amateur is taking in way too much information and needs help learning how to discriminate what is important."  (UVEI seminar, 10/29/2013)

In addition to knowing what information to store and how, experts also have more efficient retrieval of knowledge because it has been "conditionalized," meaning it includes not only the knowledge but also the contexts in which that knowledge would be useful.  Expert teachers know not only what information to store, but also why and how that information will be useful in the future. 

The book then takes it a step further to discuss adaptive expertise and the idea of meta-cognition, which the authors define as "the ability to monitor one's current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate."   [How People Learn, p47]  Maybe that's the step that elevates one from good to great, the ability to monitor your own understanding and press further when you feel it's not enough. 

While I still believe my two mentor teachers are geniuses,  I now understand better the skills they have have developed over time as they moved from novice to expert teachers.  It took many years and lots of practice learning what information is important, what patterns to look for, how to group information into "big ideas" and how to effectively store and retrieve that information.  

"The ability to recognize the limits of one's current knowledge, then take steps to remedy the situation, is extremely important for learners of all ages."  [How People Learn, p47]