Unknown Unknowns

I know of few phrases that have been so derided in recent times as Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “Unknown unknowns.” In all honesty, though, as nonsensical as the phrase may seem at first glance, it actually conveys a very important idea, one that we as educators should be much more aware of. The same idea is also contained in Socrates’ famous quote “If I know anything, it is only that I know nothing.” In that case, Socrates would have been talking about Known Unknowns, and both of those represent points on a kind of spectrum of competency. I remember graduating from college thinking I knew a good deal about how the world worked, and six years later I’m convinced we know next to nothing about that same subject. What could have possibly happened (besides the insidious and very real imposter syndrome)? Simply put, the more I learned, the more I started to see the gaps, and I’m sure most readers who have an advanced degree can entirely sympathize with that experience. Because we have such a firm grasp of what we still need to learn, we are at or near the end of the competency spectrum.

When students start out, they are what can be considered “unconsciously incompetent.” I know that sounds like a harsh term, because of the unavoidable connotations of the word “incompetent,” but it simply means that novice learners don’t have competence with a particular skill set, and that they don’t know how to address that…that is, the unkowns are, to them, unknown. As they learn more and start to develop skills, students (if primed to think about how they learn) hopefully develop the ability to highlight important areas for improvement. They have become “consciously incompetent,” meaning they are still struggling to develop a skill, but they now know areas where their knowledge is lacking. I like to think of my own development as a musician: when I first started learning violin, everything was new and I had no idea how to even start learning the instrument. Nowadays, although I still have a lot of room for improvement, I have a firm idea of things that need work: my tone, my use of dynamics, and so on. Armed with that knowledge, I can devise strategies and devote effort to fixing my weakness. Is that not precisely what we want our students to be able to do?

Of course, “conscious incompetence” is only about halfway through the competency spectrum. Getting students there is a huge accomplishment, but ideally we want students to be able to move even further, to “conscious competence,” where they have conscious mastery of a skill set. I would argue that many starting graduate students fall into that category. We enter graduate school with a solid handle on research methodology, writing, and the technical know-how of our fields, but we are still developing and it may still require a good deal of effort to use those skills. At the final end of the spectrum is “unconscious competence,” which I like to think of as synonymous with “second nature.” Again, I like to refer to my own music education: although I am definitely consciously incompetent with the violin (maybe consciously competent on a good day), playing trombone or piano are second nature to me. I don’t have to consciously think about all the small technical details that add up to performance, I just do them. Of course, at one point, that was far from the case, and it has only been constant practice and use of those skill sets that has allowed me to fluidly and competently play music. That’s certainly another argument for the importance of challenging work to help students develop, but I would argue that we need to be aware of the competency spectrum for two other reasons.

We as instructors are usually unconsciously competent, with the possible exception of first-time instructors teaching something somewhat outside of their immediate field. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, being unconsciously competent can actually prove an obstacle to effective teaching, because we may have forgotten what it was like to first learn a subject and the particular obstacles we faced. For instance, when I taught my remedial marine science course a couple of summers ago, I stumbled (to put it mildly) when it came time to teach the Pythagorean Theorem. The math and idea was so familiar to me that I could not comprehend how differently my students were approaching the problem (compounded by my lack of knowledge of metacognition), and I just ended up doing the worst thing a struggling instructor can do: repeating the same thing over and over. Had I taken the time to really consider what my students were thinking, perhaps it would have occurred to me to start with a tactile, physical example of how the Pythagorean Theorem actually works in the real world, which would have been a much better starting point than just jumping into a formula with no background. Any time we teach something that is second nature to us, we risk falling into the same problem, and so next time you’re teaching something and students “just don’t get it,” consider the possibility that we just haven’t yet given them the framework to understand the skill in the way we do. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this issue beyond active thought on our part as instructors, but actively talking with our students to understand where they may be stumbling is an essential first step.

The second reason that the competency spectrum becomes essentially important is a bit broader-scale than issues of instruction. Even the luckiest students, those who know precisely what they want to do in life, start out without clear knowledge of how to make that happen. In other words, they have a goal, but no path. Of course, this is why we have well-defined curricula; students may know what they want to do, but we as the experts (presumably) know how to help students get there. In the traditional approach to education based on set curricula, this is an excellent solution to that aspect of students’ unconscious incompetence (assuming the curriculum is well-designed and articulated, but that’s a separate issue). However, in recent times, there has been an extremely rapid growth in “personalized education,” education that is student designed and driven. While the importance of passion in driving learning cannot be overstated, shifting curricular control mostly or entirely to students (especially at lower levels) carries a great deal of risk because of students’ unconscious incompetence. Ignoring the fact that many starting students may not even know what they want to do in the long run, how can even the best-meaning student truly design a curriculum that works for them if they don’t know what they need to know or learn? This is not an insurmountable obstacle, of course, and I honestly think the shift to a more personalized education is a net good thing. That said, as the shift continues and “students as customers” (why I despise that notion is a separate subject) get more control over their education, we have to remember that in this case, the customer is not always right. If they were, they wouldn’t need an education.

And maybe we can all learn a new instrument in the meantime; it just might be that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to learn something entirely new.