Reflections on knowledge and skill acquisition

Since entering graduate school almost two years ago, I have often reflected that I can feel myself growing smarter. I am not only talking about learning new facts and applying them to my practice as an educator. More, I am referring specifically to my ability to think critically, reason, question, and problem solve. Many times I thought I was just excited to be back in the classroom in that capacity again. However, after reading this week’s text selection, I felt validated when Slavin (2012) discussed brain research that found “that as a person gains in knowledge and skill, his or her brain becomes more efficient” (p. 155). I understand that this specific research  supports the idea that our brain utilizes fewer spaces as skill increases; however, this ties neatly with the notion of automaticity, which occurs when skills are so fluid and fluent that there is no apparent effort involved. I am by no means implying that I find graduate school effortless. To the contrary, being in graduate school, working full time, and having a life provides numerous challenges that sometimes seem insurmountable. Instead, I’m referring to the ease at which I accomplish the tasks put forth to me by my professors.

Thus, the great hope as a teacher is to identify ways to instruct students, allow them to discover, and practice new skills to the point where eventually there is that level of automaticity. So the great question, is how do we teachers attain that? Based on readings, some of that comes from the brain growing, developing, and doing its things. However, this seems a very minor component of the larger puzzle. Exposure is essential to developing the proper pathways to build knowledge (Slavin, 2012). Therefore, adults (including parents and teachers) must provide rich and meaningful experiences to help build the neurological pathways and background knowledge to facilitate long-term storage of new semantic memories.

A second takeaway from this week’s readings also caused me to reflect on my personal experiences as a student. The notion of interference was raised by Slavin (2012), and was defined as “the inhibition of recall of certain information by the presence of other information in memory” (158). What’s interesting about this is pondering the number of stimuli that could potentially interfere with the acquisition of new memory. Personally, I’m fascinated by what makes for optimal conditions to learning and how to subsequently apply that understanding to help my students learn. If a student is being bombarded by auditory stimuli, how can there be merit in many student’s claims that they learn better why listening to music – and not the calm, tranquil kind. This seems counterintuitive, but so many claim this, there must be some merit there, right? Certainly, I look forward to learning more on this subject and how I can apply this to my practice.

Slavin, R. E. (2012). Educational psychology: Theory and practice (Tenth ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.