Becoming an expert requires trial and error and a lot of verbal and written instructions. Dreyfus believes that it takes five stages to go from rule-guided “knowing that” to experience-based know-how. No matter what type of training, the best teacher is concrete experience with real situations. Some novices will advance to an expert level, but not all. The stages that Dreyfus proposes are novice, advanced, beginner, competent, proficient, and expert.
There are two types of learning in the novice stage; 1) information processing – if you recognize an E because of the relationship of the horizontal and vertical lines and 2) holistic template matching – recognize an E because it matches prior items you have seen and learned that it is an E. In this stage, the learner acquires knowledge of rules and how to follow them. In order to be able to exercise the skills, a learner has to utilize a great deal of concentration, so little is left to listen to advice. The novice recognizes learned components and then applies learned rules and procedures to situations. A good example is a new baker who follows the recipe closely to achieve success.
The second stage is “Advanced Beginner” – a learner only advances to this stage after they have considerable experience coping with real situations. Therefore, I advocate for learning experiences that are designed to provide several different scenarios taken from subject matter experts in the field to achieve concrete scenarios for the learner to make decisions. It provides a safe environment for success and failure. The learner begins to recognize situational aspects and positions that have been learned through trial & error, and no one is able to know how they combine facts or identify features to know what comes next. Yet the learner has advanced to the next stage. An advanced baker has now made the recipe enough times they no longer have to read the recipe.
Competence is stage three – in this stage, the learner has dealt with enough concrete situations that they have formed a hierarchical procedure of decision making. The learner that has achieved competence has a goal in mind and sees each situation as a set of facts. Plus, the importance of those facts may depend on the presence of other facts. They have learned that the configuration of those facts means a certain conclusion should be drawn, a specific decision made or an expectation investigated (Dreyfus, 1987). A competent baker knows that they will need to increase or decrease ingredients to get a different result. Such as if the recipe is made at a high-altitude, certain adjustments will need to be made or if they want it to be sweeter they will add more sugar, or know that they can add certain ingredients to achieve a different degree of taste. They begin altering the recipe. This stage assesses the urgency of needs and plans work accordingly. The learner becomes a problem solver when they are confronted by puzzles and unfamiliar situations (Dreyfus, 1987). These first three levels of skill are slow and detached reasoning in the problem-solving process.
The fourth and fifth stages are conversely rapid, fluid, involved kinds of behavior and the highest levels of skill. The fourth stage of proficiency denotes how a learner’s perspective immediately begins to pick out key features of situations and other features will be ignored. Mostly because the learner has experienced similar past situations which trigger what should be their next move because of those memories of successful outcomes. Intuition begins to kick in and is the “product of deep situational involvement and recognition of similarity” (Dreyfus 1987). A proficient performer intuitively organizes and understands the task and will think analytically about the next steps. Dreyfus tells us that, “elements that present themselves as important, thanks to the performer’s experience, will be assessed and combined by rule to produce decisions about how best to manipulate the environment” (Dreyfus 1987). Proficient bakers not only do not need a recipe, can make adjustments to the recipe based on previous situations, but can also begin to apply the information for all of the recipes they have worked with before to other recipes. Universally too much flour will make any recipe dry, too much oil will cause any recipe to be gooey, etc. When a person has had enough experience in a variety of situations, seen from the same goal in mind that requires tactical thinking, proficient people group together situations that share the same goal as well as share the same decision, action or tactic.
Step five is expertise. When considered an expert you know what to do based on mature, practiced understanding, you have been in this situation enough to recognize the pattern of steps and how to finish them out regardless of errors. An expert’s skill level is ingrained into them and no longer do they need to think, “with expertise comes fluid performance” (Dreyfus 1987). Everything is automatic and happens naturally and unconsciously. Talented performance results from intuitive use of the learner’s similarity and experience, thus performing as an expert (Dreyfus 1987).
Dreyfus’s model is an active progression and will move through the Novice’s rule-following, the advanced beginners’ use of aspects, competency’s detached understanding, proficiencies involved understanding/detached deciding, and finally to the expert’s total involvement. When you get to the interpretive ability level of an expert you can call that “judgment”. Novice and advanced beginners cannot exercise judgment, those in the competent category judge by means of conscious deliberation, while proficient /expert level make judgments based on prior concrete experience in a manner that defies explanation.
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