Teaching Expert Thinking

The new baseline for entry into the 21st century workforce is no longer a high school diploma, but rather, an associate degree-and a decade from now, an even greater level of education will probably be required.

In their 2004 book titled The Neiv Division of Labor, economists Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard document how: "Declining portions of the labor force are engaged in jobs that consist primarily of routine cognitive work and routine manual labor-the types of tasks that are easiest to program computers to do. Growing proportions of the nation's labor force are engaged in jobs that emphasize expert thinking or complex communication-tasks that computers cannot do."

Levy and Murnane go on to explain that "expert thinking" involves "effective pattern matching based on detailed knowledge, and metacognition, the set of skills used by the stumped expert to decide when to give up on one strategy, and what to try next."

"Complex communication," the two economists note, requires "the exchange of vast amounts of verbal and nonverbal information. The information flow is constantly adjusted as the communication evolves unpredictably."

Expert thinking and complex communication require sophisticated skills and knowledge typically infused by college education rather than secondary schooling. Higher education must rise to this challenge, rethinking both its mission and its relationships with economic development groups and workforce training organizations.

This transformation will require a few immediate shifts in standard operating practices, including:

* Shifting the emphasis in general education coursework from providing basic knowledge about the subject area to instead modeling and experiencing the types of expert thinking and complex communication in which that field's practitioners engage. For example, courses in history would have as their primary educational objective enhancing students' skills in interpretive reasoning given incomplete, inconsistent and biased data.

* Reconfiguring the structure of public education to K-14 as the minimum educational attainment guaranteed through universal access. This change would require much closer alignment between higher education and secondary schooling, with massive shifts in both types of organizations' curriculum, pedagogy, assessments, organizational structure, staffing and incentive systems.

* Investing in the sophisticated information and communications technology infrastructure necessary to foster educational, workforce and economic development through lifelong activities on and off campus, in parallel with forward-thinking nations' strategies for success in the global, knowledge-based marketplace.

A lesser response would be like shifting deck chairs on the Titanic.

Chris Dede is the Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University.

Copyright New England Board of Higher Education Fall 2005
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