Beware the Expert Blind Spot
Objects in your “mirror” may be less clear than you think!
Recently, a friend (we’ll call her Veronica) posted a photo on Facebook of her son’s latest cooking triumph; a perfectly cheesy, bubbly chicken Parmesan. Positively restaurant-worthy.
Another friend (we’ll call him Tom) commented and asked Veronica for the recipe. To which she responded as follows:
Looking at Veronica’s response, do you think Tom would be able to recreate the chicken Parmesan in the picture? What assumptions has Veronica made about Tom in her response?
To be fair, Veronica may be familiar with Tom’s cooking prowess and be confident he will understand what she means by “pound out” the chicken breasts, or “dredge through flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs.” If, however, Tom doesn’t have the expertise and cooking know-how Veronica clearly possesses, the recipe and directions she posted will be useless to him.
Tom might be left scratching his head thinking: What on earth does dredge mean? Is the order of the dredging important? Are the flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs mixed together?
As with many things, the amount of instruction and guidance Tom needs depends on his prior experience, knowledge, and level of expertise. Without knowing that, Veronica could be succumbing to her own expert blind spot.
Expert Blind Spot
When you have developed deep expertise in an area and you greatly underestimate the time and cognitive energy needed for a novice to complete an activity or understand a concept (that you think is straightforward or simple), you are failing to recognize your own expert blind spot.
The truth is: being an expert does NOT necessarily mean you are good at modeling the world of a novice and explaining yourself clearly and effectively. That is, teaching someone else something.
To Veronica, pounding out chicken, and dredging it first in flour, then eggs, and then breadcrumbs (yes, it turns out the order does matter, you don’t mix them all together, and you need to whisk the eggs first) are done so automatically, that it doesn’t occur to her that she might need to first explain these terms and why they are important.
How does this happen? And why is it so common?
Deliberate Practice
Let’s at how we develop expertise in the first place. Developing expertise requires:
Once we have developed expertise we move into a state of what is known as “unconscious competence”. At this point, we have organized our knowledge around meaningful patterns and we have multiple, flexible, efficient strategies for using that knowledge. We can also handle new challenges within our domain of expertise faster, more effectively, and without much thought.
Veronica knows that the flour on the chicken helps the egg stick to the meat a little better and she could perhaps use this technique in another recipe. But she doesn’t need to think about it. She can create the dish automatically and is not really aware of what she knows, or what she is doing. Experts in any field are susceptible to the expert blind spot and this feature of expertise leads experts to not always be the best teachers.
Experts have a highly organized, connected, and complex network of ‘chunks’ of knowledge (also known as knowledge structures or schemas). This organization helps facilitate meaningful learning and performance.
Our goal, as teachers, is to help learners move from novice to more advanced learner. To do so, we need to give students the basic conditions they need to succeed (a welcoming, safe environment with minimal distractions and low extraneous cognitive load), guide them to think deeply and make meaning of new information, and we also need to be aware of our own expert blind spots.
Unfortunately, many instructors receive little or no training in the art and science of teaching and instead rely on their own experience with teachers as well as their intuitions about how novices learn. Complicating the issue, even more, is the fact that the longer experts work in their discipline, the further removed they become from the perspective of the novice. This inability to recognize (or empathize with) novice learners’ difficulties can lead content domain experts to teach in a manner that makes sense from their perspective, but not necessarily from the novice learner’s perspective.
Let’s look at some examples:
Have you ever seen a recipe in which eggs need to be separated? If you know what that means and how to do it, then no further explanation is required. If you don’t, however, you may get stuck at this step and need to get more information.
Think about learning to drive. When you’re a beginner, each component takes a huge amount of effort and concentration to implement. Turning the key, checking your mirrors, stepping on the pedals, turning on and off the indicators. But as you develop expertise, you can perform all these tasks automatically with very little awareness of what you’re doing. But to teach someone to drive, it’s necessary to go back and decompose the complex task into its component parts, which isn’t always easy for experts to do.
An expert snowboarder can easily navigate an unfamiliar mountain. As they make their way down the slope, they quickly evaluate and factor in the slope, snow conditions, wind, likelihood of ice, and the number of other skiers and snowboarders. They might wonder why the novice snowboarder with whom they’ve been working at a different mountain is still stuck at the top of the hill trying to remember which foot should be in which part of the board.
Experts in physics (for example) can look at two seemingly different diagrams and immediately recognize that they both represent the same physics concept. Novices, on the other hand, tend to focus on the superficial features of the diagrams, and given the same set, incorrectly infer that they relate to different physics concepts.
As a result of the expert blind spot, new learners in any field may:
- Miss important information because they are still at step one when the expert has moved on to step three
- Make mistakes and do things inefficiently
- Get frustrated and begin to lose motivation
- Not grasp the how, when, and why of what they are learning
All of which can make meaningful learning (and developing expertise) that much more difficult.
We are all at risk of falling prey to the expert blind spot in our teaching and interactions with novices. There are things we can do, however, to help overcome the tendencies which come with expertise and experience.
1. Awareness: First and foremost, be aware of your own expert blind spots. Don’t assume that novices know what you know. A better assumption is that they don’t.
2. Empathy: This is a big one. To teach anyone anything you must have empathy. Consider the novice learner’s perspective. Try and remember how you felt when you didn’t know as much as you do now. Think if there are scaffolds you can provide to support motivation, learning, and a sense of self-efficacy.
3. Break things down: Identify and unpack the component skills which together make up a complex skill. Veronica could ask herself, “What else (that I haven’t written down) would Tom need to know or be able to do, to recreate this recipe?” This step may require you to talk to someone outside of your discipline who does not have the level of expertise you have. The smart, thoughtful novice may ask questions that reveal you have neglected some important steps and didn’t realize.
4. Prerequisite skills: Once you have isolated the important component skills, decide which skills need to be learned and practiced first, before practicing the whole task altogether. Experts can do a lot of things at the same time without experiencing cognitive overload. Novices, on the other hand (think of our driving example or the snowboarder), need targeted practice on the component skills before combining them. If not, they risk becoming overwhelmed and frustrated.
5. Help novices make connections: Be explicit and purposeful in helping novices make connections and see the applicability of what they are learning to other contexts. These connections won’t necessarily happen on their own. Give learners the chance to practice and learn and represent ideas in different ways. For example, teach students that fractions can be represented in multiple ways: as a ‘slice’ of a circle, a subset of a group of objects, a point on a number line, a decimal, a piece of a rectangle, and so on. Superficially they look different, but each can be used to represent the same concept.
The tendency to be unconscious of our own expertise can, if we’re not careful, influence our interactions with others in myriad ways and in contexts outside of the educational realm.
Next time you are explaining something, introducing someone to something new, or teaching a new idea or concept, take a step back, pause for a moment, and think about assumptions you may be making. Are you, assuming, like Veronica did in her explanation to Tom, that your audience knows what you know? Are you using jargon, or overly technical terms, which can potentially serve to alienate others? It can be helpful to try and recapture some of the conscious awareness of how you got to where you are; awareness which you may have lost.
Only then will you be able to effectively help novices do what you’re hoping they will do — develop expertise.
Julia Phelan Ph.D is a learning engineer and co-founder of To Eleven. The name was inspired by This is Spinal Tap (“Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder? Nigel Tufnel : [pause] These go to eleven”) and embodies the fact that To Eleven goes above and beyond in all they do. To Eleven focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of learning experiences for myriad learners and contexts along with consulting and advising services. www.to11solutions.com
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