Practitioner Expertise
Kate Walker, Research Associate
University of Minnesota Extension
kcwalker@umn.edu
Audience Survey
•
What best predicts student learning in
schools?
A. school effect
B. class-size effect
C. teacher effect
D. teacher certificate or masters degree
A skilled practitioner trumps
almost everything else
• “Teacher effects dwarf school effects:
your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’
school with an excellent teacher than in
an excellent school with a bad teacher.”
-
Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “Most Likely to Succeed:
How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?”
Quality Practice
Youths’ public art
is vandalized
Youth get upset with the
city alderman
Youth want to exclude a
member from a retreat
Dilemmas of Youth Work
• To create and sustain
high quality youth
programs, it is critical
that youth workers
understand and
effectively respond to
the daily dilemmas of
youth work practice.
Knowing Practitioner Expertise
• When someone is very good at a given
thing, what is it that actually makes him
good? [poll audience]
• The ability to appraise and respond to
diverse situations encountered in practice.
• We know it when we see it, but we don’t
have a reliable way of identifying it, let
alone producing it.
Expert-Novice Differences
•
•
•
•
Identified more concerns,
Generated more possible response,
Developed multi-pronged responses, and
Developed youth-centered responses.
Growing Practitioner Expertise
• Deliberate practice: appropriately
challenging tasks that are chosen with the
goal of improving a particular skill.
• Practitioners learn when they have
ongoing opportunities to engage with the
full range of challenging problems
associated with their practice and receive
authentic feedback.
Deliberate Practice Matters
• Collective deliberation, Socratic dialogue,
and mind-mapping of dilemmas
• Hones skills in attending to the complexity
of real world practice and addressing
diverse considerations while keeping
youth at the center.
Summary
• Youth work is full of complex dilemmas
• It’s not enough to know what quality is;
need to know how to achieve it
• Practitioner expertise can be cultivated
through deliberate practice