It’s almost impossible today for those of us involved in ‘Education’, ‘Learning and Development’, or ‘Training’ to think about learning or to do anything that encourages learning - and that’s a shame because we are generally people who care about development and helping people grow.
What stops us thinking about learning and development is all the nonsense we have put in the way: imagine that you were interested in personality and the prevailing view was astrological. You wouldn’t even be able to begin the conversation – because people would be too busy asking what star sign you were.
So let’s start from scratch and glimpse how learning looks when uncovered:
All creatures that learn, learn by doing. Even a sea slug has a life: it does things, experiences the consequences, stores those episodes and changes its behaviour. We call this learning.
Note that doing is not the only way a creature can learn, nor is it the basic mechanism that underpins learning. Many creatures that can learn, learn by observing: they can see something happen to another creature and think ‘Well I’m not doing THAT!’. Some creatures can even learn through stories – through an account of an experience related by another creature. Bees and humans, for example.
The fundamental biological mechanism that underlies all these approaches is feeling. For example, we do something, we feel the consequences (good or bad) and those feelings get stored and subsequently modify our behaviour. This is the mechanism that underpins behaviourist accounts, for example: without a reaction to events there would be no conditioning of any kind. Things that we do not react to, do not act as reinforcers.
This ‘storing of feelings’ we call memory. Memory is how we store what happens in the world - by storing our reactions to events and using them to modify our later behaviour. More sophisticated creatures can use their stored reactions to conjure up a mental representation of an episode, though this will be biased depending on what matters most to them.
Central nervous systems also exhibit something called ‘neuroplasticity’. What this means is that what a creature reacts to, can change. A small child may have no reaction at all to fine art, but as an adult they can grow to have an extraordinary and intense repertoire of reactions to different styles and artworks.
How this happens is always the same: creatures begin with a base repertoire of reactions and these become differentiated - shaped and refined through experience. Simple examples of this were also explored by the behaviourists: little Albert was instinctively afraid of loud noises. By pairing these with cotton wool, Albert developed a fear of cotton wool. But our reactions are much more subtle than pleasure or pain – we learn to have distinguish different reactions to different objects and to give them names: ‘table’ for example. In this way, we can convey our reactions to other people, using sound which express a distinct sentiment (such as ‘table’) which itself is a complex set of reactions to experiences of a certain type (a 'schema').
As human children grow they learn – for example they learn to fear wasps by watching their parents’ reaction to them. They copy their parents, and the sounds their parents make such as praise or criticism (which in turn they have learned to feel about) help shape those behaviours.
They move into a workplace and continue to learn by watching, by doing, through stories – in every case reacting to what they experience and using those reactions to shape their future behaviour.
Two people sit in a meeting, but learn different things from it. Sally learns that ‘Big Boss Bob’ doesn’t like it when Amanda chatters about her weekend. She learns this because she had a strong reaction to the expression that Bob made in response to what Amanda was saying. Mark didn’t notice Bob’s expression – by which we mean, he had no reaction to it (it may have been in his visual field). Mark did not learn that Bob did not like Amanda chattering about the weekend. Instead he noticed that Bob wears a Rolex, a kind of watch that Mark feels is ‘cool’. As a result, Sally learns not to chatter about her weekend when in a meeting with Bob, and Mark decides to open his next conversation with Bob by talking about watches.
Notice how we are now having a conversation about learning that covers everything – without ever talking about education (or astrology). We do not need this language. It is a distraction and will hide from us what is really happening. Worse still there is lots of academic research and theory around education which will distract us further because it will give us the misleading impression that what education talks about has anything to do with learning. The research & theory tends to concern memorising symbols, which (historically and factually speaking) is an infinitesimal fraction of what creatures do – and an artificial one at that.
More importantly, the research tends to focus on memorising symbols in the absence of personal significance (i.e. this is treated as an extraneous variable) which – by definition – excludes learning effects. That’s odd then, isn’t it: our research into learning excludes learning?
I feel I should say something about practical applications. About schools and work and all that.
The first thing to say is that were the entire education system to vanish overnight it would have an immensely positive effect on learning overall: children would be forced to spend more time with their parents and peers, and more quickly pick up what they do (this was the norm until very recently). This is pretty much what we saw during the pandemic. It struck me as odd that this was the first time my daughter got to see me do my job - how I talk, what I do... how meetings are run.
In like fashion, companies could disband their Learning & Development teams with negligible impact on learning – because corporate L&D often merely apes the educational model - and suffers the same failings. This is what ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) did. The bit organisations would miss would be regulatory compliance, where they would expose themselves to legal risk.
So – rather like this conversation – if we wanted to be gainfully employed we would have to start again, this time with an understanding of learning. I am not going to detail all of what this means (this is why I wrote How People Learn), I will highlight two things though:
Firstly we would have to be human-centric. If we do not take the time to understand what people care about we literally cannot begin to design learning experiences that will change them.
Secondly, since most of the things people care about are already in place, most of the value we could add would be in producing things that help people with what they care about (predominantly resources).
In other words: people learn through challenges. Challenges are things which are affectively significant to people (like moving to a new country, starting a new job, or being respected by one's peers). We either create new challenges, or help them with the ones we have today.
Presently, it is rare we do either.
image: stefan steinbauer
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