Practitioner Expertise Kate Walker, Research Associate University of Minnesota Extension

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

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 Gladwell’s New Yorker article, “Most Likely to Succeed: How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?”

Quality Practice

Youths’ public art is vandalized

Youth get upset with the city alderman

Youth want to exclude a member from a retreat

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.

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 don’t have a reliable way of identifying it, let alone producing it.

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

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.

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.

Summary Youth work is full of complex dilemmas It’s not enough to know what quality is; need to know how to achieve it Practitioner expertise can be cultivated through deliberate practice