I would suggest that educators have become familiar with an example of the concept of thinking like a practitioner but may be missing the bigger picture. The example presently in vogue is coding (programming) as in proposing that computational thinking represents a generalizable set of thinking skills (procedural skills) applied by programmers and possibly developed through learning to program at an age/experience appropriate level.
Before schools dive in head first, it might be prudent to explore comparable areas of practice that could develop important knowledge and thinking skills (I like to use the term procedural skills). What would be the most productive and efficient uses of this concept in classroom settings? If time and resources are limited, what types of practice (as in the activity of a category of practitioner) should be prioritized?
Do we have other practitioner experiences in classrooms? I have been thinking about this question for some time. In my thinking, I have found it useful to differentiate knowledge from skills. What is it a programmer knows? What is it a programmer has to do to program? Substitute a different practitioner for programmer and consider the knowledge and skill distinction I have identified. Do students exploring these other areas of practice develop important knowledge and procedural skills?
I started thinking about this when exposed to the training of a group of practitioners I knew little about – historians. I was not a fan of the study of history even though I had experienced high school. At a later point in life, I learned a little about the training of historians and became familiar with what I as a trained research psychologist would call a “methods” course. Future historians took a course I recall being called “The historians’ craft”. Essentially this course developed the skills and expectations by which the historian turns sources or data (photographs, diaries, interviews, etc.) into explanations of historical phenomena. How do you maintain objectivity? How is it you identify trends in causation that can be differentiated from the perspectives of the individuals offering the artifacts that are being examined? Is it possible there are multiple accounts of history that are legitimate? What historians do is more than learn about what other historians have concluded. What others have written might be described as background knowledge. What historians do is acquire background knowledge and combine this through rigorous thinking with careful data acquisition procedures to create more advanced and accurate accounts of the past? I spent my career as an educational researcher (psychologist) and I additional was trained at the undergraduate level as a biologist. I started to appreciate that all of these areas of practice involved considerable overlap when it came to the knowledge base that must be acquired and the practitioner-specific data collection and analysis skills that must be applied.
My point – I think most professions at a core level involve knowledge and skill development. When it comes to generalizability, is computational thinking superior to historical thinking? Since we expect students to take several history courses already, perhaps by including opportunities to “do history” we might develop some very important critical thinking skills. How do you avoid bias in personal thinking? How do you come to a conclusion that reflects multiple perspectives? We could certainly use citizens with skills such as these? How do these skills stack up against skills such as breaking a problem down into subcomponents and algorithmic thinking (claims for the type of thinking developed via programming).
I think the “think like a practitioner” approach works well for some practitioners you might not consider. How about think like an author? Yes, everyone is “taught” to write, but actually writing to communicate is different. Consider that writing to inform often requires that you learn about a topic. For example, I am not making up what I am writing here up. I have learned about topics such as “authentic tasks” and the training of historians in order to communicate through the procedural skills of writing. Writing to communicate also involves higher order thinking skills of multiple types. Like programming, it requires identification and organization of the parts of a whole. It involves the exercise of critical thinking. Given the multiple and often conflicting positions on an issue, what position can I best take and defend.
There is an instructional argument for the value of “writing to learn” that is consistent with both the development of writing, thinking, and cross-curricular content knowledge skills. What ever happened to students spending time writing to learn? Not an “in” approach at the moment, but it will probably resurface when coding to learn fades.
How about teaching? Teachers are certainly a category of practitioners. Teachers must develop both content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge (procedural skills). Some of these procedural skills involve explaining and developing a different type of understanding than is required by just a primitive level of knowing. Teaching to learn is not really that difficult to imagine than writing to learn and offers many of the same benefits. Both have general utility across content areas at a level of frequency of possible use I just don’t see for programming.
This post is getting long, but I hope you can see where I am going with this. What would a scalable level of functioning like a biologist look like? Students do labs, but how closely does a carefully orchestrated lab experience compare to what a biologist actually does? What would “authentic” research look like for any area of practice that can be associated with a course-specific content area?
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I think it possible we have become fixated on programming because it is a new content area for K12, seems directly associated with a profession that is seen as lucrative, and seems to offer unique potential. I don’t see programming as offering unique potential or necessarily developing cognitive skills that are unique. In my opinion, what programming does offer is a ready-made scalable practitioner experience and this is attractive. Kids can code in Scratch, Kids can code simple robots. Students can take complete programming courses at the secondary level. If these opportunities get educators and administrators excited, I wish they would widen their vision a bit, appreciate the similarities of logic I have identified, and recognize the practitioner opportunities that could be associated with many existing courses/content areas.
Note: If this perspective is of interest, some of my original thinking was seeded by the following article.
Brown, J., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18, 32–42.
