I am going over a book I once read: “Motivation in Education,” and I see more clearly than ever how specific and compartmentalized modern expertise is.
An extremely high level of knowledge is expected on a narrow issue for any scientific work. Like “The Role of Expectancy and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in the context of motivation in education.” Knowing dozens and dozens of sources, their various theories and beliefs, their differing terminologies, the methodology they used to conduct their experiments, any weaknesses in the experiments or in the logical development of their arguments, etc. Beyond that, to be an expert one needs to know what the “holes” are in between the shreds of evidence: What hasn’t been checked; what has been checked but is not quite conclusive; what has been checked a few times with contradicting results.
While it’s not easy to be an expert even in a narrow field, it is extremely difficult to be an expert in a wide field, such as Motivation of school-children in general. More difficult to be an expert in a wider field such as Learning of school-children. It’s probably superhuman to have a real understanding of an issue as wide as schooling in general, which involves students, teachers, parents, finance, politics, etc. I have never met anyone who claims to have a “real understanding” of the education system as a whole, including sufficient detail to be able to say something definitive about what needs to be done in a specific situation. Not that there is any dearth of people who are happy to tell us what to do in every situation we encounter.
To make very clear sense of a real world situation, we need to have very clear knowledge of all the components. As a simple example, if a pupil seems to be falling behind in his grades over a few months, we need to at least understand the nature of material studied, the material studied by that pupil’s previously, a host of motivational issues specific to that pupil, much about the dynamics in the class, the specific dynamics between the pupil and classmates, dynamics between the pupil and teachers, dynamics in the pupil’s home and personal life, neurological and health issues specific to the pupil, the situation in society in general (e.g., is there a war going on?) and more. And these are just the facts to consider. In order to consider each set of facts with clarity, we need a different expert – one expert (or team?) for each “compartment” of knowledge. And then there is the integration – getting the experts to discuss their insights and let a single picture emerge.
It is not difficult to act with perfect expertise in real-life situations. It is impossible.
What can we do when faced with real situations, involving real people? One way is to rely on less-than-expert knowledge in the general situation (schooling, in this case) and have enough specific-domain experts looking behind our shoulders and keeping us from doing something already known to be dumb.
An extremely high level of knowledge is expected on a narrow issue for any scientific work. Like “The Role of Expectancy and Self-Efficacy Beliefs in the context of motivation in education.” Knowing dozens and dozens of sources, their various theories and beliefs, their differing terminologies, the methodology they used to conduct their experiments, any weaknesses in the experiments or in the logical development of their arguments, etc. Beyond that, to be an expert one needs to know what the “holes” are in between the shreds of evidence: What hasn’t been checked; what has been checked but is not quite conclusive; what has been checked a few times with contradicting results.
While it’s not easy to be an expert even in a narrow field, it is extremely difficult to be an expert in a wide field, such as Motivation of school-children in general. More difficult to be an expert in a wider field such as Learning of school-children. It’s probably superhuman to have a real understanding of an issue as wide as schooling in general, which involves students, teachers, parents, finance, politics, etc. I have never met anyone who claims to have a “real understanding” of the education system as a whole, including sufficient detail to be able to say something definitive about what needs to be done in a specific situation. Not that there is any dearth of people who are happy to tell us what to do in every situation we encounter.
To make very clear sense of a real world situation, we need to have very clear knowledge of all the components. As a simple example, if a pupil seems to be falling behind in his grades over a few months, we need to at least understand the nature of material studied, the material studied by that pupil’s previously, a host of motivational issues specific to that pupil, much about the dynamics in the class, the specific dynamics between the pupil and classmates, dynamics between the pupil and teachers, dynamics in the pupil’s home and personal life, neurological and health issues specific to the pupil, the situation in society in general (e.g., is there a war going on?) and more. And these are just the facts to consider. In order to consider each set of facts with clarity, we need a different expert – one expert (or team?) for each “compartment” of knowledge. And then there is the integration – getting the experts to discuss their insights and let a single picture emerge.
It is not difficult to act with perfect expertise in real-life situations. It is impossible.
What can we do when faced with real situations, involving real people? One way is to rely on less-than-expert knowledge in the general situation (schooling, in this case) and have enough specific-domain experts looking behind our shoulders and keeping us from doing something already known to be dumb.
No comments:
Post a Comment