When Our Expertise Becomes a Liability

Expertise is not easy to build. It requires years of study, extensive practice, and sustained focus. Expertise in a content area is built on deep understanding, well-established knowledge constructs, and well-honed schema to address complex problems. Without question, this type of expertise is a great asset.

However, content expertise can also create challenges in our work with students. In fact, in some circumstances, expertise can be a liability. The depth and complexity of what we know can make it difficult to grasp where students are early in their learning journey. We can forget what it was like to be a novice learner.

We must sometimes look beyond our expertise to see what students need and discern how best to meet their needs. Information that seems obvious to us can be anything but obvious to new learners. We can make assumptions that overlook important information and procedural components for early learning. We can underestimate the time, effort, and support students will require. Let’s examine six times when our expertise ceases to be an asset and instead becomes a liability.

Expertise can reduce flexibility. Students come with varied levels of background knowledge and readiness to learn. They often require varied learning experiences and pacing to succeed. However, the process of honing a skill can lead to overreliance on a single method—a method that has worked for the teacher. High levels of competence can lead to overdependence on a strategy or practice that has seemed to work well in the past.  

Antidote: Consider what students need before choosing a strategy or approach.  

Expertise can result in high expectations without support. Years of experience and gained expertise can lead to assumptions about how easily a skill or concept can be learned. Consequently, important scaffolding elements can be overlooked, leaving students struggling to understand key steps and gain insights crucial to learning success. 

Antidote: Listen carefully to students’ questions, identify recurring areas of struggle, and offer scaffolding where needed.  

Expertise can create instructional blind spots. Expertise is a result of extensive practice that leads to automated skills. High levels of expertise can lead to ignoring key initial learning elements, overlooking misconceptions learners hold, and presenting information in “chunks” too large for students to digest.  

Antidote: Adopt a beginner’s mindset. Imagine having no knowledge or experience when planning steps and sequences to build learning paths.  

Expertise can generate overconfidence. With expertise comes a deserved level of confidence. However, too much confidence can inhibit reflection, create resistance to feedback, and result in reluctance to innovate. Certainty can be both a gift and a curse.  

Antidote: Balance (deserved) confidence with humility.  

Expertise can underestimate emotional barriers. Student experiences play significant roles in their learning. Past trauma, current worries, and anxieties about the future can all affect what students learn and how well they learn it. Cultural context and personal perceptions matter. The best instructional strategies and deepest content knowledge may not overcome the barriers that students’ emotions can pose to their learning.   

Antidote: Be open, sensitive, and considerate of the emotions students may be experiencing when designing and facilitating learning activities.  

Expertise can unintentionally create cognitive overload. Experts tend to think in large informational and conceptual chunks. They understand relationships and sequences. However, students often experience new learning content as disconnected elements. Their working memory can quickly and easily be overwhelmed. When working memory is overloaded, little learning occurs, and even less is remembered. 

Antidote: Break information and processes into small elements, provide schema and graphic representations, and ensure adequate time for reflection and application of new learning. 

Content expertise can be a great gift to our teaching. It can also get in the way if we come to rely too heavily on what we know over what students need. The challenge is to embrace our expertise while remembering what it felt like to be a novice learner. When we inject humility, empathy, and curiosity into our teaching and relationships with students, we both become more successful.