Practitioner Expertise

Kate Walker, Research AssociateUniversity 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 thecity 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