Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt to changing life circumstances and respond effectively to these changes. This important ability develops through experiences accumulated over time. Adaptive expertise is expressed through cognitive flexibility, continuous learning, metacognitive thinking, and the ability to address unfamiliar problems in diverse and creative ways. It also involves striving to improve knowledge, skills, and ways of acting. Individuals with adaptive expertise tend to examine challenges from a broad perspective that allows them to assess their existing knowledge and identify opportunities to expand the knowledge and skills needed to address the challenge. For this reason, adaptive expertise is a particularly important skill in the dynamic reality in which we live today.
Research has identified positive relationships between adolescents’ cognitive flexibility and academic achievement, enjoyment of school, life satisfaction, sense of meaning, and academic expectations. The development of adaptive expertise is possible across a variety of domains. It can be cultivated among both teachers and students, for example by promoting cognitive flexibility, encouraging innovation, and providing tools for decision-making and problem-solving. Cognitive flexibility among teachers is expressed when they respond to the diverse and changing needs of the learning environment and its participants, and when they cope with unexpected situations (for example, responding to diverse and evolving learning contexts). In doing so, they model adaptability and flexible thinking for their students.
Integrating citizen science into schools encourages adaptability and cognitive flexibility. Participation in citizen science enables participants (teachers, students, scientists, and others) to encounter reality, with both its advantages and its constraints. Coping with this reality, and with the opportunities or limitations that arise from it, may support the development of cognitive flexibility, including various aspects of adaptive expertise. These interconnected aspects include:
Personal flexibility among learners, expressed in openness to change and in the development of norms and habits for working with the various participants involved in a project. For example, norms of listening—even when speakers use unfamiliar terminology—and maintaining a broad perspective.
Pedagogical flexibility among teachers, which enables them to adapt teaching and learning processes to the needs of the project and to changing circumstances. For example, selecting a project that aligns with the school’s vision and curriculum, and integrating the project within existing instructional frameworks. In recent years, the Ministry of Education has worked to provide schools with greater autonomy and managerial flexibility, as reflected, for example, in the GEFEN reform, which aims to expand schools’ pedagogical and administrative flexibility.
Mutual flexibility, enabling all stakeholders to address different goals and constraints, including students’ interests, the research constraints of project scientists, pedagogical considerations of the school, and the local context.
Administrative flexibility, which supports responses to organizational challenges and considerations such as the schedules of the various participants involved in the project.
For example, in the “Iris” Project (see the implementation story “Communicating Science”), students encountered situations in which they had to change their research questions. Through this experience they learned that ecological research in the field can be unpredictable, surprising, and engaging. They discovered that, unlike the experiments they conduct in science lessons, research findings are not always immediate (“Teacher, the snails ate my experiment”).
Deepening and Expansion ▼
Adaptive expertise
Crawford and colleagues (2005) describe adaptive expertise as the ability to effectively apply existing knowledge to solve new problems. Individuals with adaptive expertise can identify situations in which their performance may improve if they depart from habitual procedures, rules, or norms. Adaptive experts use their knowledge to develop new approaches to solving problems and learn from such situations. They are typically characterized by a broad perspective. Studies comparing experts who demonstrate flexibility and adaptability with those who do not suggest that such abilities help avoid errors and support more accurate assessment of complex situations.
The importance of flexibility among teachers
Collie and Martin (2016) conducted a review of research on flexibility among teachers. Human lives are characterized by change and uncertainty, including new beginnings and unexpected situations. Flexibility refers to the ability to respond effectively to change in terms of behavior, thinking, and emotions, and it develops through life experiences. This ability is important for everyone because it enables adaptation to changing life circumstances. Studies have identified positive relationships between adolescents’ flexibility and academic achievement, enjoyment of school, life satisfaction, sense of meaning, and academic expectations. Flexibility is especially important for teachers because they must respond to diverse and changing needs among students. For example, teachers need to adapt lesson plans and activities, manage classroom situations, and respond to changes in their roles within the school. The researchers developed a questionnaire to assess teachers’ flexibility and to examine factors that influence it, such as school climate (for example, the autonomy provided to teachers by school leadership and teachers’ involvement in school decision-making). The findings indicate that teachers with higher levels of flexibility tend to have students with higher academic achievement.
Differences between novices and experts in relation to cognitive flexibility
Chapter 2 of the book How People Learn (Bransford et al., 2000) examines how experts learn and solve problems compared with novices. The chapter begins with several research examples illustrating how experts develop expertise in fields such as chess, physics, mathematics, electronics, and history. It then outlines several central principles of expert knowledge and discusses how they may be applied in teaching and learning. These principles include the flexible ways in which experts retrieve relevant knowledge, as well as their flexibility in approaching new situations which is an aspect of adaptive expertise. The chapter presents adaptive expertise as a central component of meaningful, effective, and metacognitive learning that also supports learners’ ability to continue learning independently throughout their lives.
Additional Resources:
Ministry of Education, Pedagogical Administration. Pedagogical Flexibility – Its Many Dimensions (2013). Retrieved from:
https://meyda.education.gov.il/files/QualityTeaching/Pedagogical_flexibility.pdf
References ▼
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). Chapter 2 - How experts differ from novices. In How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded Edition), pp. 31-50. Washington, D.C: The National Academies Press.
Collie, R.J, & Martin, A.J. (2016). Adaptability: An important capacity for effective teachers. Educational Practice and Theory, 38(1), 27-39.
Crawford, V. M., Schlager, M., Toyama, Y., Riel, M., & Vahey, P. (2005, April). Characterizing adaptive expertise in science teaching. In annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (pp. 1-26).
Kali, Y., (2006). Collaborative knowledge-building using the Design Principles Database. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1(2), 187-201.