How do you teach expertise?

After reading the book chapter, “Designing Instructional Strategies: A Cognitive Perspective” by Silber and Foshay, I proceeded to complete my midterm task 3 on an expert profile of Dr. Foshay. I listened to a lot of interviews, read more interviews and really connected with things he was saying about the corporate training world not being prepared with enough content experts who also have instructional design training. This chapter from Pershing’s Handbook of Human Performance Technology: Principles, Practices and Potential, read like a handbook for the layman. Someone who was promoted to trainer, without any prior instructional design training, could read this chapter and immediately make connections with the content matter they are meant to teach and the structured, cognitive approach to these instructional strategies.

My father was a corporate trainer for many years, after careers in two other fields prior, and he never had any training in instructional design. Luckily, as a trained pastor and teacher (as well as a natural-born teacher), he fit into the corporate trainer role quite easily. After reading this chapter, I wonder if having a framework such as the strategies outlined here would have made his job a lot easier.

In my research of Dr. Foshay, I came across an interview with EPPIC from 2014, where Foshay was lamenting the fact that most organizations are at great risk because their most valuable assets, their high-level experts who have been at the organization for 10-20 years, are small in number and cannot be replicated. He went on to say that when you ask these experts how they learned what they know to solve problems every day, they say that it can’t be taught. Foshay refutes this statement and believes that research shows that you can teach it, you can measure it, and it can be done with more efficiency than trial and error over decades. Yet, most training departments don’t focus on learning what the long-termers know, but they focus on low-level, procedural tasks that can be defined, instead of focusing on what is most important to the organization.

Hearing this resonated with me, as I had been in international education for 22 years (prior to a COVID layoff). Looking back on my two most recent positions, in my six and a half years at Butler University, I was a one person office. When I left the position, it took them two years to fill it, and I remember always telling others that no one really knew what I did, and that put the institution in a bad place. In my last job, I was there for just over 10 years, and the second longest tenure in our organization. Whenever I hired people, I looked for how I could teach them what I know in a short period of time. My institutional knowledge (not just of our organization, but of the 60+ universities around the globe we worked with), along with relationships I had built, programs I had managed and problems I had solved, were really hard to replicate. I would have loved to have known how to measure what I knew so that I

could teach it to those I was managing. We did our best teaching processes and procedures, and teaching by example (i.e. traveling together the first time or two, seeing emails I sent to students or university contacts to learn the communication part). But I want to know Dr. Foshay’s secret to measuring and teaching expertise, because even today, I tell my husband all the time, “I don’t know how I know what I know.”

Foshay is still asking the big questions: What is expertise? How do you measure it? How do you teach it? How do you define it in an organization? He still considers this “cutting-edge work”….How do you teach what you know?

Resources

Pershing, J. A., Silber, K. H., & Foshay, W. R. (2006). Designing Instructional Strategies: A Cognitive Perspective. In Handbook of human performance technology: Principles, practices, and potential (3rd ed., pp. 370–413). essay, Pfeiffer.

Wallace, G. (2014, December 21). HPT legacy 2010 Rob Foshay. YouTube. Retrieved September 19, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XJG1NdsXKzw.