The document discusses expertise in work life and education. It outlines two types of expertise - routine expertise, which involves familiar skills and routines, and adaptive expertise, which involves flexibility and the ability to solve novel problems. Experts in different fields were interviewed and described expertise as developmental, requiring constant learning. Problems in work often involve social and technical challenges. The document also proposes methods for developing adaptive expertise in education, including collaborative problem-solving of authentic problems over multiple cycles and having students document their own learning processes.

1. EXPERTISE IN WORK
LIFE AND EDUCATION
Pirkko Hyvönen
Post doc research fellow
University of Oulu
Educational Sciences and Teacher Education
LET (learning and Educational Technology Research
Team)
pirkko.hyvonen@oulu.fi

2. CONTENT
• Two types of expertise: routine and adaptive
• Expertise in work life: what is it like in different
fields?
• Expertise in higher education: How to learn
adaptive expertise?
pirkko.hyvonen@oulu.fi

3. YOUR TASK
In the end of the lecture, draw conclusions. At least three main points.
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4. TYPES OF EXPERTISE
Bransford, 2001; Bransford et al., 2000; Brophy, Hodge, & Bransford, 2004; Crawford, 2007; Hatano & Inagagi, 1986
EXPERTS and EXPERIENCED
NON-EXPERTS (Bereiter &
Scardamalia, 1993)
Career may conform
merely to the
routines, not advancing
expertise and problemsolving.
EXPERTS and novices
Which kind of expertise is
valued and aimed; and how
to design learning
processes, evaluations, lear
ning outcomes and
instructions.
ROUTINE EXPERTS
Everyday skills, routines, are developed
in familiar environments and in familiar
tasks. Routine experts can develop
their accuracy and fluency.
ADAPTIVE EXPERTS
Set of cognitive, metacognitive, social, and emotional
strategies, where individuals abandon
‘routine’ problem-solving strategies.
Adaptive experts are more
flexible, inventive, spontaneous, encour
aging and creative. They deal with
novel, unexpected situations and
problems, and build knowledge at the
same time. They increase their core
competencies plus and go beyond their
comfort zone!

5. ROUTINE EXPERTS:
Acting and dealing with problems
 Surface level perceptions
 Do not see hidden messages, do not see
problems
 Weak skills to solve new problems, but can
solve familiar problems.
 See one suitable way to solve problems
 Want to solve the problem quickly, and move
to next tasks.
 Sparce knowledge base -> may think quickly
 Mainly procedural knowledge
 When situation unexpectably
changes, efficiency decreases, because they
try to solve problem by imitating familiar
solutions that are not suitable for the
situation.
Routine experts are
competent to solve
problems that are
familiar and
expected.
Name some concrete
situations or problemsolving processes in
work life (choose
domain), where
routine expertise is
useful.

6. Adaptive experts
are competent to
solve problems that
are novel and
unexpected
Name some concrete
situations or
problem-solving
processes in work life
(choose domain),
where adaptive
expertise is useful.
ADAPTIVE EXPERTS
Holoyok: truly expert,
Bransford: competencies plus
 Make perceptions of problem and its context;
dissect various different perspectives
 See a problem as an opportunity to learn, learn in
problem-solving and produce new knowledge
same time
 Classify, label, analyse problems
 Perceive patterns and differencies
 Start to organise problem around central concepts
or idea
 Ponder forward, theoretical reasoning
 Dence knowledge base  thinking may take time
 Think and identify novel solutions and possibilities
 Strong conceptual understanding
 Flexible in using knowledge
 Evidence-based argumentation

7. EXPERTISE IN WORK
LIFE
(Hyvönen, Impiö & Järvelä, submitted)
Expertise is commonly valued
phenomena; it is also recognised
as an essential competence in
contemporary work life.
Individuals need more and more
tackle with problems and tasks that
require adaptive expertise.

8. EXPERTISE IN WORK LIFE
Informants (N=13) are experts in different formal domains
On what ground they are considered experts?
 They are in a leading and demanding position.
 They are key persons in their field.
 They are considered as more competent than other people in
the field.
 They have a long career and high education.
 They are skillful and successful learners.
 They consider themselves as experts.
 Each of them are experts at least on two domains.
”Expertise is easiest to identify when it differs most dramatically from
what ordinary people can do” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993)
(Hyvönen, Impiö & Järvelä, submitted)
let.oulu.fi / etunimi.sukunimi@oulu.fi

9. EXPERTISE IN WORK LIFE
 How experts define expertise?
1) Expertise is future-oriented having
a developmental and advancing
perspective. They are expected to
innovate new or re-new existing
practice, processes and products.
2) Developmental perspective and
performance is conjugated with need
of constant learning and
understanding things and processes
(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993).
- Factual, procedural and selfregulative knowledge
- Tacit knowledge
- Multifaceted domains
let.oulu.fi / etunimi.sukunimi@oulu.fi
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10. 3) Expertise is increasingly a social and collaborative
phenomenon, which lay both opportunities and challenges for the path
of expertise.
- Opportunity: social view, collaboration and even technologies in
collaboration can enhance construction of shared expertise.
- Challenge: collaboration is effective way of learning, but does not
happen easily
- Social skills, communication, use of technologies
- Learning from and with other people
- Understanding other people: without it domain-specific
expertise cannot be exploited
let.oulu.fi / etunimi.sukunimi@oulu.fi
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11. 4) Experts
 Have a strong self-confidence, and trust on their team to develop,
create and construct new solutions
 Knows how to act rationally in certain situations
 Have sensibility to perceive situations
 Are diligent, curious, flexible, self-initiative, and modest
 Expert’s work is not automatic nor easy.
(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Hyvönen, Impiö & Järvelä, sub; Tsui, 2009)
let.oulu.fi / etunimi.sukunimi@oulu.fi
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12. EXPERTISE IN WORK LIFE
 What are the problems like?
Situations are always complex and difficult, and you can never be fully
prepared for them. Problems in working life involves more than running
through ‘routines’.
1) Understand people and interacting with them. Problems with people are
related to communication, social interaction, shared understanding and
emotional constrains, such as envy and hostile atmospheres, which tend to
prevent developing innovations and also expertise.
2) Inadequate technical tools. Although many ICT tools are in use, there are still
lack of tools and software that solve very compound problems.
3) Decision-making problems (Johnson, 1988; Jonassen, 2007): experts at times have
to make decisions without the necessary information.
4) Sharing tacit knowledge
5) Dealing with time, motivation, prioritization and overlapping tasks
let.oulu.fi / etunimi.sukunimi@oulu.fi
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13. EXPERTISE IN WORK LIFE
 How do the experts perform ‘routine’ and ‘adaptive’
expertise in their work?
“There is no such thing as routines in my work.”
1) Degree of routines declines, when complexity of work and experience of
individual increases: “The more I have experience in this work, the less there
are routine cases.”
Cycle: ability to make perceptions and decisions augments  environment can
provide complexity in relation to her abilities and edge of competence
2) Creativity, insight and playfulness (see, Brophy et al., 2004; Hyvönen, 2008;
Weisberg, 2006) seems to play a role in adaptive expertise.
3) To some extend adaptive experts can adjust the complexity
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14. 11.11.2013
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15. EXPERTISE IN WORK LIFE
 How useful education has
been for their current position?
1) Overall, formal education has not
satisfactorily provided resources for their
current work; instead, it has provided
basic general knowledge. Education is
lacking of important areas that are
needed in work life, such as
communication, negotiation and
presentation, even writing and discussing
skills were not adequately provided.
2) Only exception was education in
engineering, that has provided skills in
problem-solving and foreign languages,
which are essential in expert work.
let.oulu.fi / etunimi.sukunimi@oulu.fi
(Hyvönen, Impiö & Järvelä, 2010)
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16. HOW TO LEARN ADAPTIVE
EXPERTISE?
Bransford, 2001; Brophy, Hodge, & Bransford, 2004; Crawford, 2007; Hatano & Inagagi, 1986
1. Help students to understand
their own processes of knowing
and problem-solving!
(Collaborative problems-solving
method and expert profiles)
1. Help novices to expand
knowledge and
understanding in the areas
of their interests (Islands of
expertise)

17. Help students to understand their own processes of
knowing and problem-solving!
1. EXPERT PROFILES
 Monitoring, documenting and reflecting learning
experiences, and writing expert profile along studies.
(Bransford, 2001; Brophy, Hodge, & Bransford, 2004;
Crawford,
2007; Hatano & Inagagi, 1986)
2. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING METHOD




Theoretical basis is in expert studies, collaborative learning and
self-regulated learning.
Learning of adaptive expertise requires several cycles of
problem-solving processes
Problem-solving processes are long-lasting
Problem-solving includes knowledge construction, self-regulation
and expert performance

18. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING METHOD
Problems
are authentic cases from work life;
they are not as in work life, but real
assignments
are new for the individuals
are open: ill-structured and
messy, where multiple solutions are
possible.

19. Examples of open problems
Elektrobit (EB) 2010 (Six different open problems)
1. Open Source & Developer Communities
Various developer communities are now important in software
designing. Many software adaptations are based on open
source platform (eg.
Linux, Symbian, Qt, Android, MeeGo), while various informal
communities work as developers. One temporal question is
how open source culture and joining in developer communities
can be promoted?
Heiss, Janice J. (2007)
2. Motivation and managers
Managers face questions and situations that are linked to motivation
and flow of work. In order to help managers to coach team members
they need to understand, what motivation means and what affect to
motivation. How to increase understanding among coaching
managers? How manager could help experts to maintain their
motivation through work career?

20. Business Kitchen (2012)
Environment for creative collaboration was
needed.
Pudasjärvi (2009)
Pudasjärvi is sparcely populated
municipal, where politicians decided to
close many of the schools. That caused
even 2-hours bus trip for school children
to get from home to the nearest school.
http://www.businesskitchen.fi/blog/

21. COLLABORATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING METHOD
Approaching the problem
① What is the core of the problem? Explore, learn about the
problem; analyse and define it.
② What is the context of the problem? You need to understand
the context of the problem. Find information adequately.
③ What do you need to know about the problem? Learn more
about the problem – core concepts, reseach-based approach.
Useful questions:
What do you know about the problem and what more you need to
know/define in order to solve the challenge? (Brophy et al., 2004)
How do you know what you know? (Explaining) (Calin, Jagerman, &
Ratner, 2005)
Is some previous situation similar to this? What is common?
Explain why it works.
What are the next steps: goals and strategies?

22. 2
1
3
6
4
5
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23. 1. GROUP FORMATION
Common grounding
- Knowing each others
- Strengths of the groups
- Norms and policies
Creative collaboration:
Athmosphere:
egual, thrustworthy
Power-relations: not
disturbing by causing anxiety
or fear
Expert
- Socio-emotional
challenges
- Commitment, participatio
n
- Recognise expertise
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24. 2. NEED / PROBLEM
- Explore widely problem space: discuss
and analyse various
needs/challenges/problems, where
new solutions, change, or processes
are needed
- Use various brainstorming methods:
shared drawing, maps etc.
- Allow playfulness and creativity:
atypical thinking, funny ideas, weird
associations
- Creative collaboration:
creativity/playfulness integrated to
analytical and practical thinking
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Expert
- Perceptions of context
and problem
- Various perspective
- Hypotheses
- Organisation of
elements of problem
around central concepts
- Categorisation of
knowledge
- Decisions and
groundings for them
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25. 3. DEFINING THE PROBLEM /
GOAL SETTING
- After analysing and understanding
the problem space, group defines
exactly the problem, for which they
start to look for solutions. Various
hypotheses will be discussed.
- Transfer: what we already know
from previous experiences?
- Group states aims and actions on
how to proceed in order to find
solutions.
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Expert
- What we already know
about the problem?
- What perspectives are
important to explore?
- What resources we
need, what kind of
expertise we need to
work with us?
- How this problemsolving case resembles
previous experiences
of problem-solving
cases?
- How do we proceed
from now?
25

26. 4. UNDERSTANDING and DESCRIBING
THE CONTEXT
- Group looks for information about the
context using different
recourses, eg., scientific articles, other
documents and communities.
- They deal and construct knowledge
together.
Expert
- Distinguishes relevant
knowledge from nonrelevant.
- Monitor and reflect
constantly:
actions, goals, socioemotional
climate, understanding
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27. 5. BUILDING NEW SOLUTION and
DEFINING NEW OPERATIONS
MODEL
- Group keeps on looking for
relevant knowledge in order to find
the best solution to the problem at
hand.
Earlier studies, discussions with other
experts (transferable knowledge
about similar problems).
Ponder causative relations, test
various alternatives, use different
Expert
methods.
- Uses research-based methods: adopts
-
newest knowledge about how people
learn.
Takes risks, be creative and innovative.
Combines theory with practice.
-
-
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Adapts to changing situations.
Uses various
strategies, methods and
approaches
Uses various recourses
Constructs new knowledge.
27

28. 6. DISPLAYING RESULTS
Expert
- “Answers” for the
problem
- Groundings
Photo: N. Impiö
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29. Examples of results for problems by Elektrobit (EB) 2010
Posters and booklets

30. CONCLUSIONS
Drawn by the students
Adaptive and routine expertise are two types of expertise.
They approach and define problems differentetly, adaptive experts
more in detail.
Adaptive experts look forward and backwards in their learning.
Adaptive experts see problems as challenges.
In work life, tools for collaborative learning are needed.
Combining playfulness with analytical and critical thinking is
important.
Creativity is important in problem-solving.
The only ’routine’ for adaptive experts is a continuous change of
situations.
Being experienced does not necessasarily mean being an expertise.
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31. THANK
YOU!
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