Our recent experience with pandemic teaching thrust us into novel learning environments and forced us to consider how best to learn under such conditions. One common challenge of expert instructors is understanding the learning needs of novice students, a challenge exacerbated by the disruptive nature of teaching during a pandemic. Ironically, expertise can be a liability as well as an advantage when it comes to teaching novice learners (Ambrose, et al. 2010; Ludwig, 2020). When expert instructors are disconnected from the needs of novice learners, it is known as an expert blind spot (Nickerson, 1999; Hinds, 1999; Korn, 2021).
This poster highlights a cross-institutional professional development adventure where participants learned how to solve the Rubik’s Cube with a group of colleagues to gain insight about the learning (and teaching) process, how that differs among learners and context, and pedagogical strategies that help meet specific needs of diverse learners. The practical challenge to the group:
learn how to solve the Rubik’s Cube in less than five minutes in a six-week period!
For a brief video overview of this poster,
please vist here.
Ambrose, S., Bridges, M., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M.C., Norman, M.K. editors. (2010). How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Pg. 112-120.
Hinds, P. (1999). The curse of expertise: The effects of expertise and debiasing methods on predictions of novice performance.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 205-221.
Ludwig, L. (2020).
Why I Learned to Solve Rubik’s Cube: Seeing the Expert Blind Spot.
Mathematical Association of America Focus, April/May, 10-12.
Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know - and sometimes misjudge - what others know: Imputing one's own knowledge to others.
Psychological Bulletin, 125, 737-759.
Melissa Korn, (2021, Feb 26)
How to Teach Professors Humility? Hand Them a Rubik’s Cube,
Wall Street Journal.