The Expert Novice
As someone who believes that powerful teaching is at least as much art as it is science (with all due respect to the data-driven instruction boom), I know that there is no single, magical, component that makes it happen. As I continue to explore what I have learned about teaching by teaching, I come back again this week to the idea that content expertise is one very important component of the foundation on which we build a pedagogy.
At least in secondary education, it is by content that we label ourselves. We are math teacher or history teacher or art teacher or science teacher or English teacher. And while elementary educators may not label themselves by discipline, their days are generally divided by those same labels. So content is inextricable from teaching. It is the foundation of many of our learning standards. It is our vehicle for teaching the thinking skills we really want students to develop.
So we must be masters of our disciplines. But the teacher's is a kind of mastery different from the engineer using calculus to build bridges, or the historian serving as guardian of the story of our country, or the painter creating a masterpiece, or the scientist doing stem cell research, or the writer crafting a novel that touches hearts and lives. Anyone who seeks to teach anything effectively, must be able to see his/her subject as an expert does, with all its complexities and nuances, and simultaneously be able to see that same material from the perspective of a novice, in order to be able to help students find the handles they will need to take hold of the subject for themselves.
That sounds simple. But once we have read and understood Shakespeare, we can't unread it. We can't unlearn how to find the area of a cylinder or how to convert from grams to moles. We can not be novices again, but we have to remember what it was to be one.
Ironically, my understanding of the content neophyte has (probably coincidentally) deepened over time, along with my own content expertise. And this understanding has led me to two implications it has for teaching.
I remind myself regularly that assigning is not the same as teaching. Assigning lists of terms to be memorized is not the same as teaching students how to develop their own vocabularies, or even how to use the words on the list. Assigning questions to be answered on Act I of Hamlet is not the same as teaching students how to approach challenging texts and to make meaning from them. Assigning an essay to be written is not the same as teaching students how to generate ideas and make connections and craft a composition that conveys those ideas.
Even more often, I remind myself that there is no reason in the world why I should expect that doing something once is sufficient to result in meaningful learning. For example, writing one paper a year in which students are expected to do a little research, and incorporate that, correctly cited, in an insightful argument that is well-written and correctly formatted according to the guidelines of MLA style, rarely results in many students gaining a lasting understanding of how and why to work the whole process in such a way that that understanding can be transferred to another project or another class. On a smaller scale, I should not be too surprised if a senior student asks where Shakespeare was from, even though they have certainly heard that fact before in ninth grade, and again in tenth grade.
Thinking about what there is to know, and what subset of that I think is important for my students to know, means having to go from content expert to content novice as I figure out how to help students move along their path from novice toward expert. That irony is where every teaching experience starts.
At least in secondary education, it is by content that we label ourselves. We are math teacher or history teacher or art teacher or science teacher or English teacher. And while elementary educators may not label themselves by discipline, their days are generally divided by those same labels. So content is inextricable from teaching. It is the foundation of many of our learning standards. It is our vehicle for teaching the thinking skills we really want students to develop.
So we must be masters of our disciplines. But the teacher's is a kind of mastery different from the engineer using calculus to build bridges, or the historian serving as guardian of the story of our country, or the painter creating a masterpiece, or the scientist doing stem cell research, or the writer crafting a novel that touches hearts and lives. Anyone who seeks to teach anything effectively, must be able to see his/her subject as an expert does, with all its complexities and nuances, and simultaneously be able to see that same material from the perspective of a novice, in order to be able to help students find the handles they will need to take hold of the subject for themselves.
That sounds simple. But once we have read and understood Shakespeare, we can't unread it. We can't unlearn how to find the area of a cylinder or how to convert from grams to moles. We can not be novices again, but we have to remember what it was to be one.
Ironically, my understanding of the content neophyte has (probably coincidentally) deepened over time, along with my own content expertise. And this understanding has led me to two implications it has for teaching.
I remind myself regularly that assigning is not the same as teaching. Assigning lists of terms to be memorized is not the same as teaching students how to develop their own vocabularies, or even how to use the words on the list. Assigning questions to be answered on Act I of Hamlet is not the same as teaching students how to approach challenging texts and to make meaning from them. Assigning an essay to be written is not the same as teaching students how to generate ideas and make connections and craft a composition that conveys those ideas.
Even more often, I remind myself that there is no reason in the world why I should expect that doing something once is sufficient to result in meaningful learning. For example, writing one paper a year in which students are expected to do a little research, and incorporate that, correctly cited, in an insightful argument that is well-written and correctly formatted according to the guidelines of MLA style, rarely results in many students gaining a lasting understanding of how and why to work the whole process in such a way that that understanding can be transferred to another project or another class. On a smaller scale, I should not be too surprised if a senior student asks where Shakespeare was from, even though they have certainly heard that fact before in ninth grade, and again in tenth grade.
Thinking about what there is to know, and what subset of that I think is important for my students to know, means having to go from content expert to content novice as I figure out how to help students move along their path from novice toward expert. That irony is where every teaching experience starts.
Comments
Post a Comment