The role of explicit, academic knowledge

was put on having teachers understanding the reasons behind the procedures (Freeman, 2002; Widdowson, 1990). While deliberate practice does stress skill development, procedural knowledge is not the only thing learned in deliberate practice. Schema and theory development can also be part of deliberate practice, as long as these are generated from the experience of practice, not from abstract discussion. For example, Tsui (2003) reported on a teacher who spent several years trying new activities and new activity arrangements until she figured out what she wanted in terms of vocabulary instruction.

Furthermore, the purpose behind deliberate practice is not the automatic and mindless use of techniques. Deliberate practice can be used to increase skill and knowledge, so that learners gain the facility to do more than they have been taught. “The experienced chess player learns many patterns. But for the expert these do not become patterns that restrict thinking and result in stereotyped, predictable play. Instead, they are used as building blocks for increasingly sophisticated analyses and strategies of play” (Bereiter

& Scardamalia, 1993: 110-11). In addition, if creativity and innovation are part of the activity being learned (as in teaching), it should be part of deliberate practice. “[O]ne of the requirements of adaptation is to participate in the pursuit of ideal goals of the group, and this necessitates continued progressive problem-solving. Adapting to a scientific subculture, for instance, requires more than mastering a body of scientific knowledge and skills. One is expected to make some advance on an unsolved problem between this year’s convention and the next” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993: 104-5).

In summary, to move from basic competence to expertise, teachers need to engage in deliberate practice. This is not specific to teaching; the need for deliberate practice seems to be a general requirement for the acquisition of expertise in any practice. The research presented in this section indicates that while some kinds of knowledge can be gained with deliberate practice during the actual activity (e.g., teaching), other kinds of knowledge need deliberate practice outside of the activity for expertise to be acquired.

The implicit, practice-specific and dynamically organized knowledge acquired from quality deliberate practice is the basis for sophisticated and creative teaching.

they do, help them analyze and view their knowledge critically, and provide ideas for deliberate practice. “The role of external input of theory, prescriptions, and the experiences of others lies in how these can help the individual teacher to articulate her experience and thus make sense of her work” (Freeman, 2002: 11). For example, Tsui (2003) reported that the exposure to public, academic knowledge was critical in the development of the expert teacher in her study.

It was only when she attended the PCEd course [a graduate program in Hong Kong] that she began to understand the theoretical rationale behind her classroom practices and to reflect on her teaching in a more systematic and principled way. The theorization of her own practice became the basis for her future pedagogical decisions…The more profound theoretical input in the Master’s course in English language teaching enabled her to formulate her own theories of grammar teaching. For example, her analysis of the problems with textbooks confirmed her own conviction of using authentic materials for teaching (Tsui, 2003: 201:

Emphasis added).

The four L2 teachers in Freeman’s study also used public conceptions and explanations to develop their understandings of their own practice. “The new discourse…enables them to perceive and articulate their own feelings and thoughts about teaching in new ways” (Freeman, 1991a: 446). While public knowledge is used in this process, the focus is on understanding the teachers’ internal data (i.e., what the teacher has experienced as a teacher and as a student) not on the public, external data on which the academic conceptions are based.

In fact, there are situations where explicit knowledge can be much more effective than having learners abstract their own theories from their own internal data. Learning from experience in professional contexts alone can be very difficult, even those requiring little sophisticated knowledge (Huet & Mariné, 2005); this difficulty stems from the fact that cases can be complex, similar cases do not occur with regularity, decisions need to be made quickly without time for analysis, feedback is missing or highly selective, etc.

(Strasser & Gruber, 2004). If learners have enough experience in the practice, general conceptions can be helpful in scaffolding their learning. For example, Schwartz and Bransford (1998) conducted a series of experiments with college students learning psychology. The data consisted of classic psychology cases and the students either compared the cases, compared the cases and received a short lecture connecting the cases, or did a number of related tasks. The results showed that comparing cases and a lecture were much more effective for using the cases to understand new psychology cases than, reading, summarizing, or comparing cases without a lecture.

Although contrasting cases are effective at scaffolding the development of differentiated knowledge, there is a limit to what we can reasonably expect people to discover…This is where direct teaching can play a valuable role. It can offer a higher level explanation that would be quite difficult or time consuming to discover. A higher level explanation is important because it provides a generative framework that can extend one’s understanding beyond the specific cases that have been analyzed and experienced (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998: 510).

6.4.3.2 Feedback

Feedback on the result of deliberate practice is vital as learners (or those helping learners) use information on previous performance (e.g., problems or differences between what was expected and what happened) to refine deliberate practice tasks in order to focus on those aspects of practice which need more facility. “[S]ubjects actively try out different methods and refine methods in response to errors and violated

expectations” (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993: 367). One of the principal uses of explicit knowledge is to check the results of implicit cognition and provide feedback.

“The explicit system has a largely regulatory function, overriding the implicit system when it encounters novel situations for which it has no response” (Boreham, 1994: 172).

While implicit cognition is relied upon because it is quick and uses few scarce cognitive resources, it is a quick and rough cognitive system which is not always accurate. For example, Gilhooly and his colleagues found that doctors interpreting ECG data would make a diagnosis quickly and then use their explicit biomedical knowledge to check on their diagnosis. “From the trace description a clinical diagnostic hypothesis tends to be retrieved quite quickly. This may then be checked by biomedical reasoning about the kind of trace the hypothesized condition would produce” (Gilhooly, McGeorge, Hunter, Rawles, Kirby, Green, & Wynn, 1997: 219). Similar results were obtained in a series of studies by Richter and Späth (2006). For example, participants were given information on safety of different airlines but were also told that the biggest international airlines (i.e., the airlines which the participants would be most likely to recognize) were the safest. Then the participants were asked to rate pairs of airlines in terms of which was the safest airline. When a well-known airline was paired with a lesser-known airline with an excellent safety record, reaction times were much slower, leading to the conclusion that participants were implicitly recognizing the well known airline as safe, but then using explicit knowledge to check that assessment.

As LeDoux (1996) explains, the reason why the role of explicit knowledge to check on the products of implicit cognition but not guide action has to do with how the brain works. The cortical areas (where most of the explicit processing tasks place) process information more precisely “The subcortical pathways provide a crude image of the external world, whereas more detailed and accurate representations come from the cortex” (LeDoux, 1996: 165). However, subcortical processing (where, to oversimplify, much of implicit cognition takes place) has the advantage of faster processing:

“Although the thalamic system cannot make fine distinctions, it has an important advantage over the cortical input pathway to the amygdale. That advantage is time…it is a quick and dirty processing system” (LeDoux, 1996: 163). LeDoux suggests humans use each processing system to do what it does best: subcortical (mainly implicit) processing is used for generating conceptions, understandings and courses of action, while the “cortex’s job is to prevent the inappropriate response rather than to produce the appropriate one” (LeDoux, 1996: 165). Thus, although we do not rely on explicit knowledge to guide action and cognition, it is a good tool for making sure that our

“quick and dirty” cognition does not make too many mistakes.

As we saw in the third chapter, changing or refining teachers’ conceptions does not mean that the teacher will automatically know how to teach in accordance with new understandings (e.g., Halloun & Hestenes, 1985a; 1985b; Pennington & Richards, 1997;

Reif & Allen, 1992). This process is made more difficult because interpretations of the causes of a situation are often processed in the brain as if they were knowledge (LeDoux, 1996). For example, if two boys are throwing a ball to each other and the ball hits me, I might conclude that they meant to hit me with the ball. I would then act as if I knew that they had thrown at me on purpose, even though I do not really know that this is true.

“Illusions created by misidentifying the source of effects distort the subjective experience…their products are experienced as direct or ‘true’ perceptions or memories, rather than as interpretations…Subjective experience is important because it serves as a basis for judgments and action” (Jacoby, Lindsay, & Toth, 1992: 804). This makes it

especially difficult to change teachers’ conceptions because they usually enter teacher education with extensive subjective experience with teaching and schooling as students due to their apprenticeship of observation. Furthermore, novice teachers’ conceptions are rarely challenged during student teaching (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1987). “The average student teaching experience entails little cognitive engagement, which may account, in part, for the absence of conceptual change. Instead of challenging student teachers to examine and evaluate their personal beliefs, university supervisors and cooperating teachers simply tend to provide moral support and exclusively positive feedback” (Kagan, 1992a: 76).

Explicit knowledge, however, can help. It appears that people need to be confronted with the differences between their knowledge and new knowledge in order for fundamental knowledge change to take place. For example, in a longitudinal study of 14 elementary teachers and their conceptions of assessment, Borko and her colleagues (Borko, Mayfield, Marion, Flexer, & Cumbo, 1997) found that the teachers only changed their conceptions when their initial ideas were directly challenged. Moreover, when VanLehn and his colleagues (VanLehn, Siler, Murray, Yamauchi & Baggett, 2003) looked at 125 hours of recorded tutoring of physics students, they found challenging student’s knowledge did not always produce evidence of learning, but there was no evidence of learning when students’ conceptions were not directly challenged. This seems to be true not only for individuals but also for groups. Rousseau (2004) studied a group of five teachers who attempted to reform the pre-algebra math curriculum and teaching at their school, but failed despite strong commitment to the idea and cohesive group dynamics.

Rousseau claimed that the principle reason for this failure was that many of the concepts that teachers were using to work on reform conflicted, both internally and with the conceptions of other teachers, but these conflicts were neither addressed directly nor resolved.

According to Dann (1992) there are three steps that need to be taken to use explicit knowledge to organize implicit knowledge. First, “[t]he already existing knowledge and problem-solving capacity has to be activated,…[then, the] individual subjective theories have to be confronted with new knowledge, [and, finally, to] guarantee that the newly generated knowledge becomes better than the old one, it has to be used within the relevant context” (Dann, 1992: 166). For example, the four L2 teachers in Freeman’s (1991a; 1993) study were able to change many of their conceptions of teaching and students once they were able to articulate their tacit ideas. The last idea might be the most crucial for the use of explicit knowledge: people have to see what the concept means in terms of their day-to-day practice before they are able to integrate it. For instance, in Borko’s study of elementary teachers the teachers reported that it was through talking about general concepts in terms of specific situations in their own teaching which helped them understand and integrate these ideas into their professional knowledge base. “[S]ituating the change process in the actual teaching and learning contexts where the new ideas will be implemented is an effective strategy for helping teachers change their practices” (Borko, Mayfield, Marion, Flexer, & Cumbo, 1997:

267). Another interesting example is McDonald’s (1986) study of a group of teachers who met regularly to talk about teaching. They also read academic articles in preparation for these meetings because they found it helped them understand and articulate their own conceptions and understandings of their practice. McDonald argues that the key part of this process was that their focus was on their experiential knowledge of their practice,

not on explicit academic knowledge. Academic knowledge and theory was a means to an end, not the end in and of itself.

Explicit, academic knowledge may not be the basis for professional cognition, but it does have important uses for teacher learning. First, it can scaffold the process of bottom-up learning by providing concepts for teachers to look for and explanations for patterns that teachers might notice. Second, explicit knowledge can provide teachers with feedback about their performance in deliberate practice and discontinuities between their present knowledge and the knowledge they are aiming for. Without some kind of deliberate practice, however, such insights alone are not likely to help teachers develop and enrich their practice. While academic concepts can be useful in this process when they are used as a tool to scaffold the creation of personal and context-bound conceptions of practice, not for organizing personal, professional knowledge (i.e., internal data) in terms of academic categories.