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[guitar music] This is AEDT1170U,
Psychological Foundations and Digital Technologies.
Module 10, Video 10.1 – Mastery and Expertise.
Here are the guiding questions for this video.
How do you define expertise?
And what are the characteristics of an expert?
What is considered mastery in your professional world?
And how do you measure expertise and mastery?
What psychological strategies
does Terry Orlick refer to as necessary to achieve excellence.
Let's brainstorm.
If I entered a room full of masters and experts,
what might I see?
What would it look like? What would it sound like?
Brainstorm what expertise actually is.
Make a list of the things you would expect to see or hear
in a room full of experts in your field.
Here's something to reflect on, what the experts usually say,
"Listen to us, we're the experts."
With their degrees and their expertise,
they often make you feel like your role in any discussion
is merely to nod your head and sign off on their suggestions.
But you're an expert too.
Finish reading this quotation and reflect on what it means for you
in some areas of your own life.
Terry Orlick is a sports psychologist from the University of Ottawa,
and he studied high-performers across numerous domains
including athletics, but also medicine, law, business, the arts, and aerospace.
He's created a model that identifies common mental attributes
that occur in these performers.
And from his classic book, "In Pursuit of Excellence," he says,
"There are seven critical components of personal excellence
that have continued to surface as the essence of excellence.
The presence of these basic elements
allows individuals to become the best they can possibly be
in their chosen pursuit."
Orlick's seven elements of excellence are as follows.
Commitment. Belief in yourself.
An ability to fully focus,
and also, to have good distraction control.
The ability to use constructive evaluation.
To maintain positive images and focus in your mind,
and a mental readiness.
Well, how did your brainstorm definition from slide one
compare to Orlick's list of skills?
Here are thoughts from a few others on excellence.
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What are the applications in the professional world,
and how can this be applied to both education and other professions?
Joyce and Shower state this.
"Athletes do not believe mastery will be achieved quickly or easily.
They understand that enormous effort results in small increments of change.
We, on the other hand, have often behaved
as though teaching skills were so easily acquired
that a simple presentation, one-day workshop or demonstration
were sufficient to ensure successful classroom performance."
Perhaps you could think of an example from your professional life
where the drop-in workshop was expected to help you
become excellent at a specific skill.
So where in here is the role for mistakes
in your educational system?
Do you think professionals are allowed to,
or are encouraged to make mistakes?
I'm not sure I'd want my brain surgeon making a mistake.
What about teachers, are they allowed to make mistakes?
What are the implications of this?
As compared to training for law,
medicine, Olympic athletes, and other professionals,
ten years is pretty much consistently decided to be the minimum
to be considered approaching mastery in any event.
So, in discussion forum this week, what are your views on this?
Should we extend professional training to promote mastery?
Should we change professional training to promote mastery?
And how would you change it?
Should we be identifying master performers
in the field that you work in as mentors?
And should we reward that mastery
with a financial or some other kind of gain?
Should mastery itself be rewarded or is it its own reward?
Moving on to the concept of expertise,
we're gonna look at the work of Bereiter and Scardamalia
who wrote the book "Surpassing Ourselves."
And they said that, "Expertise defies precise definition,
and to impose a definition on it at the outset
would be a sophomoric exercise
almost guaranteed to stifle productive thought."
Peters and Waterman studied excellence in companies and in the business world
and wrote the book "In Search of Excellence,"
and they say that they tried not to be too precise at the beginning
about what they meant by excellence or innovation.
"We were afraid at that point that had we tried to be too precise
we would lose the essence of what we thought we were actually after."
According to Bereiter and Scardalmalia,
"the capacity to acquire expertise is," they argue,
"one of the great and peculiar strengths of the human species.
We need to understand better what it means to acquire expertise,
what fosters and what stunts its development
and how it functions in people’s lives and work."
They talk about the difference between experts and novices.
That, "the difference between experts and non-experts
is not that one does things well and the other does things badly.
Rather, the expert addresses problems
whereas the experienced non-expert carries out practiced routines."
You might think of this in people you've worked with
who say, "We've just always done it this way."
"It's only when the routines fail
that the difference between experts and non-experts becomes manifest."
This is when we need creativity,
if you think back to our work on intelligence,
and how we're able to work in different ways
and find novel solutions.
How do we address adult education models
professional development in other fields
to make that learning meaningful, transferable and really useful
for real-world situations?
Here is a few more thoughts on expertise and intuition.
There's a really interesting book, called "The Intuitive Practitioner:
On the Value of Not Always Knowing What One is Doing,"
by Atkinson and Claxton.
And they say that, "Experience per se
is not the sole determinant of expertise."
So you could have been doing the same job for 30 years,
but that doesn't make you an expert.
"Intuitive processing of information is often posited
as another hallmark characteristic of expert practitioners."
Wow. So little bit later, in this next module,
we're gonna be talking about spirituality and technology.
So that's where we start touching on intuition processing of information.
They also say that, "We can indeed learn to improve
the frequency, reliability and quality of our intuitions."
And, "Learning to be intuitive means learning
what those conditions are for yourself.
Though stillness and solitariness are often quoted,
these conditions are personal and idiosyncratic."
In other words, you have to find out what works for you.
"Intuition refers to a loose-knit family of 'ways of knowing'
which are less articulate and explicit than normal reasoning.
This family has tended to be ignored, marginalized, romanticized
or denigrated in mainstream educational cultures."
Remember we tend to be left brain culture
that is logical and rational.
"Because its historical association and for validity
seems grandiose or mystical."
Or we don't really understand it.
But, remember Bereiter and Scardamalia –
they said that expertise means working in new
and changing situations.
So, it's pretty important to go beyond what you actually already know
to something you don't know.
Intuition lets us function fluently and flexibly in complex domains
without being able to des- describe or rationally theorize
why you're an expert.
Another way to think of this is the concept of "flow"
that Mikhail Csikzenmihalyi refers to.
"Flow is a state of immersed concentration
we're centered, distractions are minimized
and the person attains an enjoyable give-and-take with the activity."
This fluid intelligence is demonstrated
in expert performances in many professions,
and is often the feeling that Olympic gold medalists
will say they had during their best performances ever.
Can you describe a time when you had a flow experience
in your life or work?
What conditions were present?
Did you feel at one with the universe,
connected, that things were flowing in your way?
Think about that and bring that to tutorial.
Should your teachers be experts?
Bereiter and Scar- Scardamalia argue that,
"teaching is not the sort of occupation
in which you want people to be experts.
Teachers should be caring, sensitive people
and teaching is a complex human enterprise
that can't be reduced to technique."
So, "Teachers ought not to seal themselves off
as a community of experts, but ought to be involved with
and responsive to the communities in which they serve."
Think about the technological implications of this.
And I can tell you that one of the examples I wanna give you
is that, in order to create this course,
I was not the expert in creating videos.
So I would not put myself as- in a technological expertise framework.
But I know how to create the community,
and I was able to access people in my community to help me learn.
Excellent teachers are not necessarily experts.
They are active, striving people.
"They work long hours, usually at something
they consider to be quite difficult,
and they tend to set standards for themselves
that are always slightly beyond their reach."
The same could probably be said of many other professions.
Think of what you define as an excellent professional
in your area of life work.
Professionals and teachers, when they are excellent,
share many characteristics.
They like to laugh and have fun,
they're ravenous learners, their minds are seldom idle.
They're determined, courageous and resilient –
think of some of the physicians maybe you know –
and they care so deeply about their work
that they swing from exhilaration to despair,
depending on the success of their efforts.
Does this describes the best expert or master professionals that you know?
Why or why not?
What would Donald Schon say about this –
and we talked about him, his ideas of reflection in action
and reflection on action.
He said that if you're going to be excellent
you need to go beyond technical competence
to a level of human interaction that involves an intuitive,
artistic component.
From his book, the- "Educating the Reflective Practitioner,"
is this quote.
"Inherent in the practice of professionals
as we recognize as unusually competent is a core of artistry.
The artistry of painters, sculptors, musicians,
dancers and designers bears a strong family resemblance
to the artistry of extraordinary lawyers,
physicians, managers or teachers.
It is no accident that professionals often refer
to an art of teaching or management
and use the term artist to refer to practitioners who are
unusually adept at handling situations of uncertainty, uniqueness or conflict."
Here are the Synthesis Questions for today.
What are the factors in your organization
or school or work environment that promote expertise?
What are the factors that are barriers to the vel- development of expertise?
Is there a reward for mastery or expertise in your profession,
either a monetary or other promotional reward?
And how are you personally encouraged to develop expertise?
How can you create those conditions for yourself
where mastery of your profession will occur.
[guitar music] I look forward to chatting with you at tutorial.
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