Pragmatic Thinking Learning: A Journey From Novice To Experts — The Five Dreyfus Model Stages
Table of Contents
About Series
The Summary
— Stage 1: Novices
— Stage 2: Advanced Beginners
— Stage 3: Competent
— Stage 4: Proficient
— Stage 5: Expert
The Mind Map
Outro
About Series
This story is the second part of the series of Chapter 2: Journey From Novice To Expert.
The Summary
In the 1970s, the brothers Dreyfus (Hubert and Stuart) began doing their seminal research on how people attain and master skills.
Dreyfus is applicable per skill
Stage 1: Novices
Novices, by definition, have little or no previous experience in this skill area. By “experience”, specifically that performing this skill results in a change of thinking. As a counterexample, consider the case of the developer who claims ten years of experience, but in reality, it was one year of experience repeated nine times. That doesn’t count as experience.
Behaviors:
- Novices are very concerned about their ability to succeed; with little experience to guide them, they really don’t know whether their actions will all turn out OK
- Novices don’t particularly want to learn; they just want to accomplish an immediate goal
- They do not know how to respond to mistakes and so are fairly vulnerable to confusion when things go awry
- They can, however, be somewhat effective if they are given context-free rules to follow, that is, rules of the form “Whenever X happens, do Y”. In other words, they need a recipe.
The problem with recipes is that you can never specify everything fully. You can set up more rules to explain and then more rules to explain those, but there's a practical limit to how much you can effectively specify without running a Clinton-esque “it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is”
- This phenomenon is known as infinite regression
- At some point, you have to stop defining explicitly
Rules can get you started, but they won’t carry you further
Stage 2: Advanced Beginners
Advanced beginners can start to break away from the fixed rule set a little bit. They can try tasks on their own, but they still have difficulty troubleshooting.
Behaviors:
- They want information fast. You don’t want to be bogged down with lengthy theory at this point or spoon-fed the basics yet again
- Advanced beginners can start using advice in the correct context, based on similar situations they’ve experienced in the recent past but just barely
- They have no holistic understanding and really don’t want it yet. If you tried to force the larger context on an advanced beginner, they would probably dismiss it as irrelevant
Advanced beginners don’t want the big picture
Stage 3: Competent
Behaviors:
- They can troubleshoot problems on their own and begin to figure out novel problems-ones they haven’t faced before. They begin to seek out and apply advice from experts and use it effectively
- The competent practitioner will seek out and solve problems; their work is based more on deliberate planning and past experience. Without more experience, they’ll still have trouble trying to determine which details to focus on when problem-solving
Competent can troubleshoot
Characteristics:
- Typically described as “having initiative” and being “resourceful”. They tend to be in a leadership role in the team (whether it’s formal or not)
- They can mentor the novices and don’t annoy the experts overly much
Stage 4: Proficient
Characteristics:
- Proficient practitioners need the big picture
- They will seek out and want to understand the larger conceptual framework around this skill
- They will be very frustrated by oversimplified information
- They can correct previous poor task performance. They can reflect on how they’ve done and revise their approach to performing better the next time
Proficient practitioners can self-correct
They can learn from the experience of others
- You can read case studies
- Listen to water-cooler gossip of failed projects
- Learn effectively from the story
Proficient practitioner knows what can possibly break-or more correctly, what is likely to break. They have the experience and the judgement to understand what this maxims in context.
Proficient practitioner have enough experience that they know-from experience-what’s likely to happen next; and when it doesn’t work out that way, they know what needs to change. It becomes apparent to them which plans need to be discarded and what needs to be done instead.
Proficient practitioner can take full advantage of the reflection and feedback that is core to agile methods.
Someone at the proficient stage is much more like a junior expert than a really advanced competent
Stage 5: Expert
Characteristics:
Experts are the primary sources of knowledge and information in any field
- They are the ones who continually look for better methods and better ways of doing things
- They have vast body of experience that they can tap into and apply in just the right context
- These are the folks who write the books, write the articles, and do the lecture circuit. These are modern wizards
- Statistically, there aren’t very many experts — probably something on the order of 1 to 5 percent of the population
Experts work from intuition, not from reason. Although experts can be amazingly intuitive — to the point that it looks like magic to the rest of us — they maybe completely inarticulate as to how they arrived at a conclusion. They genuinely don’t know; it just “felt right”
The expert knows the difference between irrelevant details and the very important details, perhaps not on conscious level, but the expert knows which details to focus on and which details can be safely ignored.
The expert is very good at targeted, focused pattern matching.
Once you truly become an expert, you become painfully aware of just how little you really know
The Mind Map
Outro
This second part of the series Journey From Novice To Expert, tells us five stages of Dreyfus model. We can learn and asking to ourselves, at which stage is our position right now?
