Moving Toward Expertise
If you’ve ever felt like you and your students were talking to one another without actually communicating, it might be because you occupy such different positions on the spectrum of expertise. Sprague and Stuart explain the development of mastery with a model that can help us identify why these breakdowns occur and what we can do about it.
When we first begin to learn any given skill or subject, we’re in a stage of unconscious incompetence—in other words, we don’t even know what we don’t know. We’re complete novices, and we have no grasp of underlying concepts that can help us identify patterns or tell the forest from the trees. We’re often quite confident when we’re at this stage, since we don’t have enough context to recognize how little we know and how complex the learning may be. Students in many of our classes are starting from this stage of unconscious incompetence, as they are introduced to new disciplines and begin to develop ways of thinking that are new to them.
It can be quite challenging to move from this stage to the next one in the development of expertise, conscious incompetence, since crossing this threshold can feel overwhelming. Many learners are daunted when they begin to understand how much there is to know and how little they grasp, but the loss of confidence is accompanied by a better sense of what we need to learn in order to move toward mastery of the subject. As our experience grows, with repeated opportunities for practice and feedback, we can attain a stage of conscious competence, where we can perform with increasing skill. At this stage, we must still exert considerable attention and deliberation.
But something interesting happens when we attain mastery in a given domain: we enter a stage of unconscious competence. When we become experts in a subject or pursuit, we’ve been learning it for so long and to such a high degree that very complex concepts and skills can come to seem simple or obvious or easy. We can perform them in such an automatic way that they no longer impose the same cognitive load. We have accrued enormous prior knowledge, and we can remember new things more readily because our brains make so many connections. Our knowledge structures have become so dense and so flexible that new information and new ideas, even contradictory ideas, are relatively easy to incorporate into those structures. We organize our knowledge very differently than novices can, because we are fluent with overarching patterns, and we can bring our knowledge to bear in novel contexts.
It’s easy for us as experts to forget how much time and effort went into attaining that expertise. Often the most challenging part of teaching beginners is remembering what it’s like not to know something. Because we’re used to performing complex reasoning maneuvers and other skills so swiftly, we tend to forget how many things we’re doing at once, leading us to skip steps that novices need to follow. We tend to forget how to “unbundle” the skeins of thought so that non-experts can learn them. But in order to help our students make progress, we have to be able to break down our knowledge structures and help them build their own, brick by conceptual brick.
If you’d like support crafting assignments that give students practice and feedback with the component tasks that make up learning complex skills and concepts, we’d be happy to help! Please get in touch at pro-teaching@fsu.edu. We look forward to working with you!