Rain Dancing

I am not wantonly destructive. Part of the reason for turning from the education/training debate towards the future is a recognition that it is too painful for many people to move on.

The training industry does not do learning. Like education, training is not meaningfully connected to learning. Learning goes on – literally – outside the training context.

A recent chat with Happy Henry reminded me that training is not merely education; training will sometimes aim at being a ‘great experience’ whilst education rarely does.

This serves to flag the central problem: training may be education or entertainment but is not yet learning.

A trainer may have people sitting at desks looking at the board (education) or they may have people having fun & eating pizza (entertainment) and in most cases it is some combination of the two, depending on how conservative the trainer is.

Learning is distinct and different from these two activities. A learning experience is rarely a ‘great’ experience. Neither would we design great experiences if we were interested in learning - we would design learning experiences. 

This is because learning is – at a biological level – change. It represents expenditure of effort, something that all creatures tend to avoid unless driven by disequilibrium. Mentally, we are ‘cognitive misers’; learning is hard.

So as a rule of thumb we would be better with: ‘a learning experience is a challenging experience’ – and of course more often than not a challenging experience is not a great experience. It may often seem great looking back (once the effort is expended) but at the time it is tough. Are we designing tough experiences? We are not.

We are not designing tough experiences because we only have these two models to work from – the educational experience (not learning) and the entertaining experience (not learning). We assess educational experiences on what people can memorise (level 2) and training experiences on how much they enjoyed it (level 1). We have yet to do learning experience design. We cannot seriously risk venturing into level 3 measures since learning is "a change in behaviour or capability as a result of memory" (How People Learn) and neither education nor entertainment are designed to do that.

I can sense a feeling of objection rising within you. Education and training are, at times, challenging – 8 hours of elearning can be challenging. Just not challenging in the right way. Trainers and educators often care about helping others to develop: they will occasionally challenge people in the right way - is just that their best efforts are based on intuition & accident. They are rain dancers. They may tell a story one day that moves people. They may build a raft and change the course of someone’s life.

Rain dancing – does it work? I mean, occasionally it will rain.

*Image: Canada Guelph