This link has been bookmarked by 15 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Dec 2008, by Nikhil Krishna.
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06 Jul 10
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Carmen TschofenForcing an expert to detail the steps necessary before proceeding will often cause them to fail or second-guess. ..An Expert has experience that “is so vast that normally each specific situation immediately dictates an intuitively appropriate action.”... .Mastery is mostly about style. A Master of something is really just an “Expert on a roll.” Sometimes you may have witnessed someone or spent time with someone who is so good at something, and gets so caught up in doing it, that you can’t help but feel that you are watching a genius at work. I’d also say a Master is an Expert who can look back and put themselves in a Novice’s shoes and create the rules, and do the monitoring/mentoring necessary to help them move forward. If you have met a Master you remember them – by name – they are rare and you would do well to spend as much time with them as possible.
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02 Jul 10
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- Novice,
- Advanced Beginner,
- Competent,
- Proficient,
- Expert, and
- Master.
To keep this to as few words as possible, Dreyfus identifies five to seven stages of learning a new skill or domain:
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Novice
A novice is all about following rules – specific rules, without context or modification. You don’t need to “think” you just need to “do”. A rule is absolute, and must never be violated. The main thing to do here is to get experience following directions and doing the new skill. You can follow the instructions on a box of cake mix and hopefully produce a decent cake. All you are responsible for is following directions.
“To improve, the novice needs monitoring, either by self-observation or instructional feedback, so as to bring his behavior more and more completely into conformity with the rule.”
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Advanced Beginner
Still rules based, but rules start to have situational conditions. In one situation you use one rule, in other situations you use another. The advanced beginner needs to be able to identify the limited need to selectively apply different rules. So if you want a chocolate cake, follow the chocolate rule(s), if you want a vanilla cake, follow the other rule(s). If you are over 5,000ft of altitude you will need to alter the amount of some ingredients. This is still a recipe, but has a few decision points. Again, follow the different “branches” of instructions and you should be fine. It is easy to see how this could collapse into a large Novice category, but it is a step before the much larger step to Competence.
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Competent
You realize that your skill or domain is more complex than a series of rules and branches. You start to see patterns and principles (or aspects) rather than a discrete set of rules – rules become “rules of thumb”. You are lead more by your experience and active decision-making than by strictly following rules. What is developed now are guidelines that help direct competent individuals at a higher level. You now are accountable for your decisions as you are not following the strict rules and context of the previous stages. You’ve made a lot of cakes and have a number of recipes. When asked to make a cake of a different type you pull from experience the best way to put a new cake together. If the new cake doesn’t work out, you are responsible. This is the critical tipping point for most people when learning a new skill – and why most people never really become “competent” in most things they learn. Here you either need to decide to just “follow the rules” or spend the time to get fully involved with and take responsibility.
“Competence comes only after considerable experience actually coping with real situations …”
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At this point your understanding of your skill or domain has become more of an instinct or intuition. You will do and try things because it just seems like the right thing to do (and you will most often be right). Instead of a discrete set of different parts you can perceive a complete system. A large amount of real-world experience will show you that there are often multiple competing solutions to a specific problem and you have a “gut feeling” about which is correct. “Calculation and rational analysis seem to disappear”. Will quickly know “what” needs to be done and then formulate how to do it.
Proficiency is developed by exposure to a “wide variety of typical whole situations.”
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Expert
At this point you are not solving problems or making conscious decisions about things, you just “do” and it works. “Optimal performance becomes second nature.” People may ask you why you decided to do things “that way” and you may not know how to explain to them the 10 steps necessary to get from “A” to “B” because to you it was really just one step. Forcing an expert to detail the steps necessary before proceeding will often cause them to fail or second-guess. Here you think of grandma getting up at 6:00am and making biscuits from scratch for many, many years. She doesn’t measure, time, or probably even think about baking – she just does it, and it works. Very few people will attain this level in a particular skill or domain. Some estimates say 10-15 years in a particular area is required.
An Expert has experience that “is so vast that normally each specific situation immediately dictates an intuitively appropriate action.”
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Master
Mastery is mostly about style. A Master of something is really just an “Expert on a roll.” Sometimes you may have witnessed someone or spent time with someone who is so good at something, and gets so caught up in doing it, that you can’t help but feel that you are watching a genius at work. I’d also say a Master is an Expert who can look back and put themselves in a Novice’s shoes and create the rules, and do the monitoring/mentoring necessary to help them move forward. If you have met a Master you remember them – by name – they are rare and you would do well to spend as much time with them as possible. An Expert basketball player could be excellent at execution and without formal thought just picture the ball going through the hoop (and it does). But Michael Jordan could do it with such style, grace and physics-defying ease that you just had to stop everything and watch him when he was “in the groove.”
A Master “is capable of experiencing moments of intense absorption in his work, during which his performance transcends even its usual high level.”
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16 Apr 10
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18 Jan 10
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08 Nov 09
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04 Aug 08
Page Comments
This is in comparison to someone being "closed" about a topic of learning, in which they are not ready or willing to learn about a topic. This relates well to being "closed-minded".
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