Teacher Ollie's Takeaways is a weekly summary of many of the fascinating and inspiring things that Ollie's discovered in the world of education. Often in the form of a twitter digest, it can also sometimes include book or conference notes. Find all past Teacher Ollie's Takeaways here, 

A quick an effective way to tweak your language when leading, via @Doug_Lemov

Learning from Failures and why we should interview teachers who have quit, via @Nick_J_Rose

Rules for teachers from the late 1800 early 1900's (quirky!), via Mum

Great list of revision strategies for all learners, via @HuntingEnglish

Encouraging students to create their own analogies can boost transfer, via @DTWillingham

Great padlet list of education blogs/articles ordered by category, via @interactmaths

A guide to help students build their own retrieval practice questions, via @supermemo

Nice little note taking activity to help students reflect, via @hgse

Advanced Knowledge Acquisition: The space between novice and expert

(Original tweet here)

Was just introduced by @HFletcherWood to the concept of ‘Advanced Knowledge Acquisition’ via the paper Spiro, R. J., Coulson, R., Feltovich, P., & Anderson, D. (1988). Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-Structured Domains (scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&…)

An interesting assertion made in the paper is that maybe the way that we teach novices restricts advanced knowledge acquisition. I've recently been considering this ‘how we treat novices could restrict their development into experts' point from two different standpoints recently

I've been considering it in relation to knowledge presentation, and behavioural norms in schools. Knowledge: I know that knowledge is a necessary pre-requisite to creativity and critical thinking () but also feel it's an insufficient one. (rosasreadings.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/rev…) What's the ‘magic sauce' that takes someone from knowing stuff to applying stuff in diverse contexts? Behaviour: I subscribe to the belief that in schools, orderly behaviour (following rules) is necessary for learning. But does this reinforce societal structures that oppress, and reduce students' willingness to question societal rules and norms that were constructed in response to long outdated contexts and factors? (As an aside to my aside, in his book ‘Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed', Jared Diamond cites the retention of outdated rules from no-longer-relevant contexts as the main factor that causes societies to collapse)

So, we're told that simplistic knowledge presentation can restrict the building of expert knowledge representations down the track. The authors then coin the term ‘reductive bias’, which captures the way in which most misconceptions stem from oversimplifications.

The paper then shifts to describe ways in which we can aid advanced knowledge acquisition, suggesting the promotion of ‘cognitive flexibility’ through various different approaches, here are the points I found most salient (only numbers 1, 2, 3, and 6)

Avoid oversimplification: highlight complexities, exceptions, and interactions. By doing this we can assist our students to build knowledge whilst simultaneously developing their awareness that this isn’t the be-all and end-all of the matter.

Multiple representations: A single analogy or schema will never capture the intricacies of a complex domain. This relates to Robert Epstein’s article on how brains aren’t computers, which @Dylan_Wiliam called one of the best articles of the year: (aeon.co/essays/your-br…)

We’re then introduced to the ‘conceptual landscape’, a helpful metaphor. This ties in well with spaced repetition/distributed practice of content. By combining this re-visiting of content from multiple angles with optimum temporal spacing could lead to big learning gains.

Centrality of cases: Similar to pt 2, but, the messier a domain, the more complexity must be captured. Thus our analogies become less general and more specific – cases. Examples move from ‘this is simlar to… (analogy)’, to, ‘This is like the time when…(case)’

(Skipped 4 and 4) 6. Noncompartmentalisation of concepts and cases (multiple interconnectedness): But perhaps the ‘case’ is still to large a unit of example/analogy/analysis. Each case has multiple conceptual dimensions, which we need to connect and bring out.

The authors conclude.

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