Before my little doom machine distracted me, I was going to write this blog post about deliberate practice and expertise development. About the importance of teachers (experts) in helping learners (novices) in developing metacognitive awareness through deliberate practice (1). About how becoming an expert is about more than just knowing more. About how becoming an expert is about knowing different (2). Experts don’t just know more than novices, they think about problems differently. For example, expert physicians have richer networks of association about diseases, allowing them to see more connections among diseases and consider more options when making a diagnosis compared to novices (3, 4).
I was going to write about how thinking is hard (5) – but we do it anyways. That thinking critically about something is just about knowing more stuff, but about caring enough to think through the problem (6). Caring enough about a problem to talk about it with others. Caring enough to be wrong because the answers to your questions are worth more than your ego.
I was going to write more about how expertise is not just a cognitive process, allowing experts to process information more quickly (7, 8, 9). About how being an expert is also a social process where you become a part of a community of other experts who can hold you accountable to community standards (10).
Whatever teaching and learning are, they are more than my attempts to explain them with terms like “expertise development” and “metacognitive awareness”. They are more than “information transfer”, as if knowledge were funds in a bank that you can transfer from one account to another. I was going to tell you about the fascinating intricacies and nuances that underlie the transformative process of learning and teaching, but now all I want to tell you is that what you do every day as a teacher and as a learner is transformative, not transactive.
Teachers don’t just know more things than their students. They help to guide students through the learning process – providing feedback, setting expectations, and suggesting alternate strategies for learners (1). They also meet students where they’re at, with knowledge of what is developmentally appropriate for learners of different ages, abilities, and backgrounds (11, 12, 13). In short, teachers have the profound ability to treat students as people. People who have things that affect them outside of the classroom. People who have hopes and dreams for the future. People who have interests and a sense of humor. People who are worth more than the sum of their scores on tests. People who are far more complex than any single algorithm can predict.
