Last week, I was so happy to be invited to Jilian Stambolich’s Vocal Music AQ course for York University. This was a wonderful virtual space to talk about mentorship. This is something I have been doing a lot of lately, and I really love it. One of the reasons I enjoy having these conversations in learning scenarios is that there is a great interactive component that follows where I am able to connect with various educators to address points that I made or to probe my thinking. Last week, during this exchange time, I was asked a question about expertise. I wish I had given myself more thought time before answering. I didn't mean to imply that I am wary of the term expert. I am using this post as both a place to process my thinking and one to reflect.
Being a conversational personal and interpersonal learner, I am good at quickly generating my thinking and communicating my answers. This is especially useful when I host the weekly OnEdMentors show because I am engaged in a live conversation with a panel of educators who were gathered because they have some vested interest and experience with the topic at hand. Sometimes, I gather them because they have expertise in a certain field of education like equity, reading, edtech or even global education. When describing the show, I find myself veering aware from the term expert and finding much more comfort in the term expertise.
As I was reflecting on my answer to this group of 40 or so educators with varied experiences and years in the profession, and I feel that my answer to the question did an injustice to people with expertise. It may seem like simple semantics, because there are clearly experts in the world, especially in music and other performance-based fields. An expert is a person with extensive knowledge or ability in a given subject while expertise is great skill or knowledge in a particular field or hobby. It would follow, then, that an expert must have expertise.
I am an expert on very little so I wonder if my bias is playing a role here. I do believe, though, that I have quite a bit of expertise. It seems illogical, so I’m trying to work through it. I have a Master Degree and 24 years of experience as a teacher. I am an experienced educator having taught every grade from Kindergarten to Grade 8 in some way, yet I do not see myself as an expert teacher. I have been deeply focused on specific subjects like project-based learning, assessment, leadership, and mentorship for many years, yet I feel that I have no particular expertise in any area. I know that I have expertise creating projects and initiatives for student, teachers, schools and communities, and yet I don’t feel like an expert there, even though it’s my own original Building Outside the Blocks work. I’m not even an expert learner yet, but I’m working on that. What is the role of experience in expertise?
There is a power dynamic involved in being an expert. It infers an investment of time and commitment to the skill and training involved in becoming an expert, even if it is something that seems more gift than developed skill. We sometimes mythologize the achievement of top-level experts in various fields, given them absolute authority over our thinking. Medical specialists, great composers, world leaders, public figures, and educators have arrived at a level of expertise to make them known to us, even after they die. Expertise, though, can involve a feeling of superiority and a deference to this authority, often without question. And yet, there are so many stories of people who did not see their expertise as others did, providing other “better” examples in their fields. We trust and often entrust them as a result of their expertise. Why would we. They are experts, and that holds cache and necessitates deference- doesn't it? Experts have more influence than those with advanced skill or expertise, as they should, I think. Trust is a key factor in asserting that someone is an expert, but so are questions.
Expertise requires measurement. In sports or skill, it appears easy to see, but it is hard to make defining expertise objective subjective. There is just no real set criteria in the vast majority of fields as to what makes an expert. I wonder who decides when one has become an expert. I am also curious about whether or not expert status can be self imposed. What are the tools to measure an expert. Does one move from having expertise to being an expert once it has been declared? What data is collected and used to make this determination or track this arrival? As Seth Godin wrote, "It's easy to pretend expertise when there is no data to contradict you."
Even those who are referred to as experts don’t have all the answers. This is abundantly clear if you have followed any of the post-Covid back-to-school conversations, with experts on both sides of the 5 day return argument, sharing their authority on the subject. I wonder if I’ve become wary of experts and, even though I welcome them to teach me things, I am conscious that their label does not make them infallible. I am empowered enough not to listen to them just because they are experts. For now, I sit more comfortably celebrating expertise than experts. I’ll conclude for now by saying that the term expert is cause for more critical thought, not less, and the idea of expertise feels a bit more welcoming than the other, flawed as that thinking may be according to some experts. At this point my thinking, I find a lot of comfort in a quote by Dennis Waitley: Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning opportunity, which I do.
