What Tacit Learning Looks Like
How can a teacher tell when a student is navigating toward mastery or only parroting procedure?
“Although in a lab the neophyte can be readily inducted in procedures, it’s harder for a scientist to pass on the capacity to look suspiciously for new problems in the course of solving old ones or to explain the intuition formed from experience that a problem is likely to wind up a dead-end. The difficulty of knowledge transfer poses a question about why it should be so difficult, why it becomes a personal secret.”
—Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 74.
After the last Substack, I was asked what the instruction of tacit knowledge actually looks like. It struck me how little I have considered what Richard Sennett identifies in The Craftsman as the difficulty of knowledge transfer.
Why couldn’t any of the apprentices in Antonio Stradivari’s shop, not even his sons, make string instruments as virtuosic as his, a difference any professional musician can tell almost immediately?1
Knowledge transfer does not mean treating students or apprentices like empty vessels. A great deal of Sennett’s social critique as I understand it comes down to the importance of an individual’s, or a laborer’s, interpretation of their own work.
Rather, knowledge transfer means to initiate a student or apprentice craftsperson into a communal field of practice where they eventually may develop their own feel for making.
To adapt to an outer world of problems that arise, a practitioner must navigate an internal terrain, a map that resolves in greater clarity over time like that in a role-playing video game.
How can a teacher tell when a student is navigating tacit knowledge—and hence approaches mastery—as opposed to parroting procedure?
Tacit knowledge is on display when a student composing their senior speech tells the dean, “I like what I have so far, but it’s not at the place I want it to get to.”
Another example is when a wrestler says after a match, “I could tell the double-leg takedown was going to open up, and I just needed to be patient and keep working on other things until it was there.”
It could be when a student who is self-aware of their executive functioning looks ahead at what could be a rough week of assessments and athletics and then plans what they need to do on Sunday to set themselves up for greater breathability.
A poet works tacitly when she knows this batch of poems she is sending out is better than the last, closer to what she wants to accomplish for her own purposes.
Tacit knowledge in these examples has to do with self awareness, feeling what’s possible in a situation, guided by underlying why’s, but also avoiding “what is likely to wind up a dead end”.2
Practitioners cannot sidestep following procedures absorbed from another; an important turn, however, is one’s own self-selection of procedures fitting the circumstances of a moment.
At the same time, tacit knowledge might include knowing better when to disobey authority: “Coach, I know what you said to do, but it just wasn’t there.”
How can a teacher, coach, or mentor of teachers foster the development of conscious yet embodied knowledge in learners?
Below is an incomplete listing of elements that helped me learn a tacit feel in my domains:
Actual, visual demonstration of procedural knowledge—not just talking about it—with variations but also guidance as to when to employ different methods, or not.
Repeated practice kept fresh, varied, fun, and authentic, as well as on-the-spot, immediate feedback, ideally situated in one-on-one conferences or generalized in group instruction. A good coach does not let an athlete keep practicing the same poor positioning; at a certain point, though, it might be accepted that a junky move “appears to be working for her, and as long as she knows what she’s doing….” Learners also deserve to be able to critique the quality of practices offered, depending on whether they meet their internal needs.
Exemplars, models of quality, are co-evaluated.3 Careful selection of materials by the teacher is worth a summer of searching. Learners need a chance to imitate the moves they spot—creatively, playfully, observantly.
Shared rules of thumb, tricks of the trade, questioning schemas, and useful metaphors that aid quick navigation through the internal map of decision making.
Attentional direction: where the eyes should look and what to look for. When I revise a poem, my eyes flit between end words, repetends, POV shifts, breaks and caesuras, possible titles, which internal line might serve better as an opener or closer. New poets approach revision unsure where to direct their attention.
Ethics, boundaries, and higher purpose: so much of initiation into a community of practice is understanding what’s fair play and what’s out of bounds, shared standards of quality. Otherwise, it’s hard for a novice to know what’s a big deal and what you can surrender. Tacit learning is given expanded dimension—and paradoxically is somewhat limited by—the higher spirit or prohibitions passed on in a craft. Carol Bly, my writing mentor, insisted that what separates literature from genre fiction is an author’s underlying moral intelligence; her ethic gave my work direction for a long time and also closed off projects I might have followed. At a certain point, in order for rule-following to develop into tacit knowledge, the student-practitioner has to go inside and decide whether or not to adopt the ethic.
Sidelong to ethics, approaches and attitudes are just as important, and probably moreso at a certain point, than procedures. Last school year, I watched a master teacher of Math who shows, yes, how to complete the matrix yet also exhibits over-the-top, enthusiastic delight at the weird nuance of Math problems that come up in a set. Like the veteran lab researcher, he relishes problem finding as much as solutions.
Trust in one’s own likes and noticings are basic to finding feel. Sure, to only do what you like or prefer shrinks potential and limits the curation of a diverse repertoire. Yet if the goal is mastery, implying originality or a sense of personal direction, you have to steer yourself according to your own stars. “Start by learning to recognize what interests you,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in his outstanding Several Short Sentences about Writing4. “Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, so they never learn how to notice, not even what interests them.”
Rituals around space and time inherent to a subject’s particular devotion to shared craft: sweeping dust in a shop, honoring the date to bring copies for one’s turn on the MFA workshop schedule, the taboo against non-wrestling shoes on the mats, the legitimization conferred by gathering around rolling whiteboards in a Math study session, handling fire and storing chemicals in a lab.
Recognition as a practitioner, a kind of imprimatur. When a college instructor I respected told me after a freshmen English class, “You’re a writer, man,” it granted permission to take my own work seriously. While others might feel pressured or singled out, I felt I’d been given a license to write more, take greater risks, assume my own stances as a practitioner, not just a student.
Good schools create a culture of best practice around #’s 1 through 3, maybe 4, and rituals of space/time. Excellent coaches take daily care with most of these as a matter of instinct. Teacher training programs raise ethics that later get set aside in the deluge of the everyday.
Still, how often are any of these practices intended for tacit learning?
If I were to place tacit knowledge at the heart of a freshman Composition course, there would be daily short writes with quick comments by the teacher. I’d hold conferences with individuals while the rest are working. Grammar conventions would be embedded in a sentence-composing approach that invites students to imitate structures employed by J.K. Rowling or Annie Dillard. A first pass at reading literature would ask them to annotate what they like as well as what bothers them. Rubrics for projects would be co-developed with students drawing from features they identify in mentor texts. Most of all, I would hope to steward a democratic culture of appreciating and making good work.
The push for quantifiable, standardized outcomes naturally draws the conversation in schools away from what cannot be seen and what is naturally hard to put into words—that is, tacit knowledge.
It might seem, too, that an educator cannot get inside the heads of every student in the room to help them create an internal landscape. Yet students are already creating internal narratives around practice.
One day this May, I was assigned to library supervision after school, and a group of genuinely terrific students were huddled around a tall back table. I had taught or coached them all, and it was one of those drawn-out days when the happiest thing that could possibly happen would be to chat.
They were talking about music, and one of them surprised me when he said he liked morbid emo bands from the ‘80s, the same bands I had listened to growing up.
The boy doubly surprised me because he comes across as energetically up tempo, the super-positive star of the cross country team, the guy who buoys others with his “Let’s go!” verve.
When I asked him why he would listen to Joy Division or The Smiths before a competition, he said, “I want to be the main character.”
He meant he likes to feel low, so he can rise up like an underdog, a backdoor approach to hype. I still laugh at his line and tell teacher friends. But being the main character also implies that every student is inhabiting a kind of video game.
Every class a student enters, then, is the start of a side quest or even part of the main storyline. How we teachers, as designers of learning, make possible an open-world of experiences can determine if they see themselves and choose to level up in the game.5
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 77.
I am often bothered when teachers or departments or the IB expects students to ace an assessment by going “above and beyond” what was taught or discussed in class. How can we assess what we have not taught? The expectation struck me as inherently inequitable. Now, though, I see “above and beyond” is a wish for demonstration of implicit knowledge.
In Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship, Ron Berger captures the need for exemplars when he writes, “I want my students to carry around pictures in their head of quality work.” He goes on to add, “We need to admire models, find inspiration in them, and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We need to figure out together what it is that makes this work strong” in Ron Berger, An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship With Students (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 83.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 38. I begin almost every writing class I teach with a jazz popcorn reading of this page and the next.
The video-game metaphor is relevant here for reasons why Vygotsky said in play, children act a head above themselves. Lev S. Vygotsky, “Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child,” Soviet Psychology 5 (1967), 16.