Knowledge Categories and Management

A reflective practitioner who has gathered evidence and built personal theory still has to do something with what they know over time. Knowledge has different forms, each with different properties. A school that pays attention to these forms keeps the capability built up by individual teachers from leaking away. The article walks through the three categories of knowledge, the basics of knowledge management, and the three ways a teacher can acquire knowledge.

Categories of knowledge

The reflective practitioner deals with three categories of knowledge, each with its own properties.

Explicit knowledge

Explicit knowledge is written, codified, and easy to transfer. Lesson plans, school policies, textbooks, research papers, and shared teaching resources are all explicit knowledge.

The strength is transferability. A new teacher can read a school’s documented policies and understand what is expected. The weakness is that explicit knowledge always loses something in the codification. The lesson plan is not the lesson.

Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge is personal, embedded in experience, and context-specific. The way a senior teacher reads a class, paces an explanation, or handles a difficult moment is tacit. The teacher could not write down everything they are doing.

Tacit knowledge is more powerful than explicit knowledge for many practical situations, but it is harder to extract and codify. Schools that lose senior teachers without capturing any of their tacit knowledge lose significant capability.

The SECI model covered earlier in this chapter is one way to think about how tacit knowledge can be partly externalised and shared.

Cultural knowledge

Cultural knowledge is specific to a school, a region, a language, a religion, or a nation. It includes what is taken for granted in a particular context: how parents are addressed, how respect is shown, what topics are sensitive, what stories are familiar, what humour works.

A teacher coming into a school from outside has to learn the cultural knowledge of that school, not just the explicit and tacit knowledge of teaching. A teacher moving from a Karachi private school to a rural government school has to update their cultural knowledge, even though their tacit teaching knowledge transfers.

The reflective practitioner who is aware of cultural knowledge as a category notices when their assumptions are not shared by their students or colleagues, and adjusts.

Knowledge management

Knowledge management is the practice of tracking, measuring, sharing, and using a school’s intangible assets, including teachers’ knowledge. Schools that pay deliberate attention to knowledge management tend to retain capability that less organised schools lose.

The basics of knowledge include information (data and facts), values (what is considered important), beliefs (what is held to be true), experiences (what has been lived), rules (codified expectations), and procedures (sequences of actions). All of these are knowledge in different forms, and all need to be managed for the school to grow as a learning organisation.

The link to SECI is direct. Socialisation moves tacit knowledge between people through shared experience. Externalisation turns tacit knowledge into explicit form. Combination links pieces of explicit knowledge into larger structures. Internalisation turns explicit knowledge back into tacit understanding through practice. A school that runs all four moves keeps knowledge circulating rather than stuck.

Three ways to acquire knowledge

Three basic ways exist for a teacher to acquire knowledge:

1. Discover. Through inquiry and direct exploration. The teacher tries something, watches what happens, and learns from the result.
2. Study. Reading and learning from existing sources. Books, articles, courses, and recorded talks all sit here.
3. Communicate. Obtaining knowledge from others through dialogue. Conversation with colleagues, mentors, and peers across schools.

A teacher who relies on only one of these is at a disadvantage. A teacher who uses all three has a richer source of knowledge.

The significance of knowledge management is that knowledge involves a higher degree of certainty or validity than information alone. Information is data; knowledge is data that has been processed, contextualised, and integrated into a usable form. Schools that turn information into knowledge can act on what they have. Schools that hold information without converting it to knowledge accumulate paperwork without much practical effect.

Flashcard

What are the three categories of knowledge a reflective practitioner deals with?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Explicit, tacit, cultural

Explicit knowledge is written and codified, easy to transfer but always partial. Tacit knowledge is personal and context-specific, more powerful but hard to extract. Cultural knowledge is specific to a school, region, language, faith, or nation, taken for granted by insiders and invisible until someone from outside encounters it.

Bringing it together

A reflective practitioner who uses evidence well and manages knowledge over time has built up a professional practice that is more than the sum of individual lessons.

They draw evidence from students, from their own practice, and from the broader research community. They treat evidence as information rather than labels. They have the inquiry habit of mind that runs continuously, not only when something goes wrong. They understand the difference between explicit, tacit, and cultural knowledge, and work with all three. They contribute to and draw from the wider school’s knowledge through SECI’s cycles of socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation.

A teacher who reaches this point has built something substantial. The work of reflection has paid off in a deeper craft, more useful theory, and a fuller relationship with the wider school and profession.