Tacit Knowledge Teaching
We all remember our great teachers. Yet, it may be that great learning is not a result of great teaching, but that great teachers are simply justified in taking some credit for its occurrence. I have heard so much about how good teachers inspire or engage students in learning. And I have experience it first hand. And there is a lot of time and money being spent on trying to define effective teaching attributes and discover how to best measure these and somehow transfer them to teachers who are missing them. But the concept of "teaching" is actually a bit elusive. I remember meeting a great juggler once and asked if he could teach me to juggle. I was surprised when he said he could not teach me to juggle, but that he could help me with some concepts on how to teach myself.
The Hungarian
philosopher-chemist named Michael Polanyi introduced a new concept in his 1966
book "The Tacit Dimension". It
was the idea of "Informal Knowledge" that could not actually be formally taught that he called tacit knowledge. Formal
knowledge is basically the same for everyone, whereas informal knowledge is
unique for each of us. Most
experts today seem to think that this informal knowledge is the larger part of
a person’s knowledge base, typically built from years of collecting experience,
insight, and intuition. It
may be that somehow enabling this informal knowledge development is now becoming the primary focus of the
learning process over the more traditional consumption of formal knowledge.
Certainly teachers
once thought it their job to deliver the "formal" more teachable
knowledge to students who would then go out into the world and use this
knowledge base to build their own personal "informal" and less
teachable knowledge. Indeed
our traditional classrooms were designed to deliver the same formal knowledge
to the entire class at the same time. Now we seem to think it is important
to redefine teaching as either an art or a science or both, and somehow
explicitly measure and quantify it.
So in addition to learning, the art of teaching itself is most likely
a "tacit" skill, one learned by collecting experience, insight, and
intuition. There is
little evidence that increasing a teachers base knowledge of teaching makes
them more effective, or that removing technology or other tools from them
actually makes them less effective. It is as if we can easily “measure”
someone’s ability to juggle or keep their balance, yet still know only practice
and failure and experience and practice and some successes followed by more
practice, can ultimately make them better at the task. Interestingly enough there are robots
now that can balance on a ball very skillfully.
So has technology
such as the internet taken over the science of teaching, formal knowledge
delivery, or the job of engaging and inspiring? Certainly the vast amount of knowledge
available on the internet is alluring, fascinating, captivating, and engaging
to the point of addiction. It
has quickly put formal knowledge (right or wrong) from nearly everyone...
nearly everywhere. Academics
call this phenomenon distributed cognition. Young minds are already wiring quickly
to deal with the "critical consumption" or more simply the BS
detection once performed by the text book authors or qualified
consolidators. Potentially
the internet has become, or will soon, the almost sole content provider and the
world repository of formal knowledge, but what of Informal knowledge?
Lev Vygotsky's constructivism theories predated the ideas
of formal and informal knowledge. However, I believe that all of the newly
claimed "effective" teachers will somehow, by whatever means
required, be able to cause informal knowledge within each student to be
constructed internally. It would be like every task was
teaching students how to juggle, and not simply learn the area of a circle,
unless that fact was somehow required for the student to become a better
juggler. It is a concept that I believe to be fundamental to the idea of
personalized learning.
I also believe
that technology, and a connected world, has or will soon become more than adept
at delivering on any required formal knowledge, engagement or inspiration that
might be required. It will
also become sufficiently adept at the majority of communication, collaboration
and coordination needs. Just
like many other aspects of our life, many of the things we once had a job doing
are now being done by technology. Certainly
education is no different and no more immune to the evolution.
Within education,
informal knowledge development is rising to take over from the age of formal
knowledge delivery. The
new skills required of teachers as informal knowledge development comes into
focus, will be directing and delivering the "experience" while
measuring levels of "insight" and "intuition" that result
from that experience and which indirectly imply that the "informal
knowledge" has indeed developed. These
are skills that require the teacher's own experience, insight and intuition,
and something that technology continues to struggle with. The delivered experience will need to
somehow cause learning to happen through failures and successes and the
resulting levels of informal knowledge development will determine a student's
readiness to continue the process on their own. These are things great teachers have
always done and a bit of tacit knowledge skill that many teachers are still
going to need to develop. And
the changes are already happening in schools across the country.
- There is a change to focus
more on students instead of classrooms.
- The classrooms are “flipping”
and grade level boundaries are fading.
- Competency is replacing the
time based expectations for growth.
- Assessments are going
authentic and becoming more adaptive and interactive.
- Individual learning maps are
replacing traditional one-size-fits-all content.
There is still a
long road ahead, but as new tools and new support for change becomes available
then more schools and teachers will start to make the journey. And as the economic wheels begin
turning then these new comers will drive even better tools and better support
for the changes and everybody wins.
But the big
winners will be the students and the world they will make for all of
us.
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