Practitioner Expertise

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Practitioner Expertise

• Kate Walker, Research Associate
• University of Minnesota Extension
• kcwalker_at_umn.edu

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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

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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 Gladwells New Yorker article, Most
  Likely to Succeed How Do We Hire When We Cant
  Tell Whos Right for the Job?

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Quality Practice
5
Youths public art is vandalized
6
Youth get upset with thecity alderman
7
Youth want to exclude a member from a retreat
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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.

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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 dont have a
  reliable way of identifying it, let alone
  producing it.

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Expert-Novice Differences

• Identified more concerns,
• Generated more possible response,
• Developed multi-pronged responses, and
• Developed youth-centered responses.

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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.

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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.

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Summary

• Youth work is full of complex dilemmas
• Its not enough to know what quality is need to
  know how to achieve it
• Practitioner expertise can be cultivated through
  deliberate practice