Implications of the Nature of Expertise for Teaching and Faculty Development

Over the last two decades cognitive theorists have learned that the development of expertise goes beyond the accumulation of knowledge and skills: expertise includes the development of pattern recognition and learned procedures that enable practitioners to deal with problems effortlessly or intuitively. Even more recently, theorists are distinguishing experts from experienced non-experts by how they use the bonus time and energy gained from solving problems intuitively. Experts invest it in tackling problems that increase their expertise rather than reduce problems to previously learned routines. Some implications of these different views of expertise for teaching and faculty development are discussed