I’ve been guilty of taking for granted “How Experts Differ from Novices,” but many of these intuitive claims got me to thinking how this knowledge can be applied.  If, as they say, “Experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notices and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment.  This, in turn, affects their ability to remember, reason, and solve problems.”  Then, we can surmise this information and ability operates on a spectrum, constantly shifting according to attention afforded to the matter, and the fluctuations of knowledge and ability over time.   It seems quite obvious that meaningful patterns are more apparent to those with more experience.

DeGroot (1965) noted that for those who are ‘green’ ideas, “had to be abstracted” – which admittedly at first, I did not understand.  Used as a verb, I think deGroot means to say that the individual has to think of a quality or concept generally and without reference to any specific example (i.e. theoretically) whereas the expert has specific experiential instances to draw upon and make mental comparisons which inevitably lead to more well-formed conclusions.  The more one learns the less they learn in the ‘abstract’ sense.  I can’t help but be encouraged by the fact that from abstraction grows a tangible sense of the world over time.

Each person’s “conceptual structures” or cognitive schemas for organizing knowledge, theories, and assertions undoubtedly differ.   Is it enough to simply be aware that they exist and as authors of our own mental processes we can designates what’s appropriate and determine when our own knowledge is insufficient?   Such a level of meta-cognition is surely unavailable to students until their education and experienced reaches a certain level of maturity.  Personally, it has taken me a long time.  Depending on my mood, environment, or the context, I may be more of less will to admit what I don’t know regardless of whether or not I desire the problem-solving ability.   In this sense, it is the “Big ideas” that will lead to conceptual understand, as the article notes, and we can guide our students toward their own meta-cognition by admitting what we don’t know, the big ideas we do not for comparison, and then bridging the gap between the two.   Certainly, we can find some comfort in being on such a journey together while giving ourselves credit for that which we do know in advance.  This is an appropriate time to tie in the chapter’s next point about how knowledge is “conditionalized” – or pertaining to a specific rhetorical situation.  If the ownus largely falls on the student to identify and generate the “condition-action pairs” then how might we, as teachers, encourage the act of “fluent retrieval”?  Contextualize everything we teach or pair memorization with contextualization?  Shall we encourage original application of concepts through writing in order to re-map conceptual and cognitive schemas in student’s minds and tattoo them on long-term neural pathways?   One can’t help but continually envision DNA tracks like rollercoasters running through our minds, quickly and chaotically driving about without a specific destination in mind.

While I do not yet teach literature or teaching, I train and teach throughout my work-day in a corporate environment.  I struggle to teach foreign concepts to my team by first relating them to known concepts and usually this works.  However, it is largely reliant on their level of understanding of the former.  In this sense I am learning forward to enriching my own pedagogical content of my knowledge area so that I can better foster learning and development with my colleagues.