What is an expert?
If we want to become a true expert at something we need to do far more than read an article or watch a YouTube video. Information alone doesn’t make us an expert. We need to apply that information in applicable situations, not just once, but repeatedly. Then we need to get accurate feedback about our attempts, preferably from someone who is already an expert themselves.
Math students, chess players, and musicians for example all practice their respective skills. Repetition is important in creating expertise but so is the timeliness of feedback. If feedback is delayed, students can form misconceptions which then need to be unlearned. The feedback also needs to be valid. A teacher who only heaps praise on a student who is screeching their violin strings isn’t likely to produce the next first chair at the philharmonic.
Yet, lots of math students, chess players, and musicians do all the above and never become real experts. Real experts go a step further. They deliberately push themselves to get better and press on past the point where many others give up. A student who only learns Calculus superficially, even if they always earned high grades, is not a mathematician. Likewise, a player who never chooses to face stronger competition or always uses the same opening moves has not mastered chess.
In education, school site administrators, district officials, researchers, education professors, politicians, union officials, education advocates, billionaires, parents, and pretty much anyone else who attended school seem to have very strong opinions about the teaching process. The problem is that almost none of them are experts at teaching.
Experts are able to mentally retrieve, organize, represent, and analyze information in their field in ways that non-experts never will. This is true no matter how many lectures we attend, books we read, research studies we perform, classes we take, or games we watch. We will never know what those who put in the effort to become an expert learn to know instinctively.
How does expertise affect schools?
Many active teachers are clearly experts at teaching. We are creating and implementing impactful lessons daily, and getting immediate feedback from our students about how our lessons can be further improved via classroom interactions and graded assignments. We are also checking if the feedback we are receiving is truly valid through verification, be it self-examination, collaboration with peers, standardized tests, or other means.
But not all teachers fit these criteria. Some rationalize the failure of their students and ignore the evidence that their efforts, although probably noble, are not broadly producing positive results. Some of us are trying to improve but are following bad advice from the administrators in charge of helping us. While some of us are receiving good advice, often from peers, but are ignoring it or not implementing it well.
Many administrators are experts at what they undertake daily – purchasing, fundraising, budgeting, implementing laws and district directives, staffing, and communicating with parents – because this is what they are getting feedback about and trying to improve. Administrators, however, are not experts in teaching and rarely have any true insights. They typically just espouse what they vaguely remember worked for them – often in other grade levels, other subjects, or vastly different circumstances – and wonder why that doesn’t help.
Unfortunately, many administrators are unwilling to acknowledge their lack of teaching prowess. Some delude themselves that they could return to the classroom and produce superior results to the teachers under their charge. Others fear that their authority will diminish if they openly admit their lack of classroom capability, and instead portray themselves as having powers they do not possess and the potential to enact solutions which they cannot achieve. There is no substitute for being solely in charge of a classroom, and no amount of additional education or training can make up for an administrator’s missing expertise.
Like administrators, many education professors and researchers are experts at what they do, lecturing and performing research, but that does not make them experts at applying what they lecture or research about in a K-12 classroom. Even if they instruct effectively at the college-level, teaching an older, pre-selected group of high school graduates is in no way comparable to educating diverse middle-school students. To be sure, teachers are foolish to ignore an education professor’s recommendations or any valid research; but understanding theory and implementing it in the K-12 classroom environment are two vastly different skill sets.
Sometimes I feel what is needed are laws that say education researchers would have to personally implement their ideas in a diverse public school before they are allowed to publish. Education research is not only highly influenced by politics, but also seldom held to the standards of its medical counterparts. Many studies are just examinations of data collected by others, in which minor correlations have been overly magnified to be major insights. There are few double-blind education studies, and for good reason – parents don’t like to have their children experimented upon. Experimenting on unsuspecting children, however, is what these school districts end up doing anyway as they implement proposal after proposal unsuccessfully.
Teachers, by comparison, routinely employ a far more effective method of research. We construct a hypothesis, then a procedure to enact it, test its validity in the most pertinent environment (our classrooms with our students) all while holding other variables constant. If the new procedure fails to improve student outcomes we quickly discard it, and if it succeeds, it’s integrated into our routines. In secondary school, teachers may have 5 or more classes to compare with up to 40 students each, and we can analyze the data from potentially 180 days per year. That’s 36,000 individual data points (5 x 40 x 180) annually, yet our observations are currently considered less valid than a researcher who may have conducted a study with as few as a dozen participants and hasn’t tried to implement it in a K–12 environment.
It would seem obvious that to make any situation better, real experts must be in charge of the ultimate decisions that are made to improve it. To be sure, those in charge of decision-making should consider input from all involved, expert or not, but it can’t be a political process. If we want a real solution to a problem, the desires of the most powerful or those with the loudest megaphone should not overrule those with the most expertise.
Teachers, despite our faults, are the only ones who can save our schools, and we are the only ones that have the expertise to make them excellent. Teachers need to wrest control of the classroom back from all those who overstate their insight and who are forever unable to understand how much they don’t understand.
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