The funny thing about tacit knowledge is that you have to know what the word “tacit” means. Dale Carnegie tells us that it is good to share your inadequacies before you hand out advice. So here I am at the grand ole age of 56 and I had to lean on Siri for a good explanation of the word tacit. Maybe they just did not include that in my Irish elementary school curriculum.
I have officially attended three Literacy Partner-style trainings now, and have learned all about our expert dilemma of unconscious competence and how it affects the students we are teaching. It made sense to me that there are things that we inherently know and we forget to take the time to tell people how we arrived at this high state of knowledge. We might think “well, if they had XYZ class, or attended high school, they should just know. Right?”
Not so fast.
I doubled down on the blindspot training sessions, and I went back to my course assignments and fixed a few things that were not implicit in directions, rubrics and such. I scaffolded my lessons. I added more low stakes tests. Students were doing better on the high stakes assignments. I felt pretty good about the clarity I was providing.
What really turned on the light bulb for me, however, was not in addressing HOW I am teaching, but in HOW I CAME TO KNOW the information that I am teaching.
Ohhhhhhh! That totally makes sense now! And the lightbulb goes on!
When Dr. Michelle Yeo presented at the District Day of Learning about student blind spots, and tacit knowledge, the Literacy Partner training finally kicked in. I was not asking myself one basic question that changed everything. I was not asking myself how I came up with the necessary knowledge to problem solve in my field. I was simply trying to simplify with learning tools and steps.
An example of this tacit knowledge scenario is when my darling husband tries to simplify information for my benefit, he often repeats his information several times because it is clearly logical to him, and maybe I am just not hearing him correctly. We forget that we have years of life experiences, education and personal interests that brought us to this point. We have literally embodied the information that we assume others should know.
I will continue to contemplate this process of how I came to know things. I will practice using the word tacit in a sentence, and the next time someone uses it in a sentence I won’t have to pull out my phone and get distracted from the actual point of their message!
