You’re standing in the Daniel Boone National Forest wearing 97 chiggers and a banjo. You’re surrounded by old-time musicians, and they’re playing this tune:
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(“Natchez Under the Hill” as played by The Fatted Calf String Band)
You want to play along. But you’ve never heard the tune in your life. What do you do?
If you answered, “Pull out my copy of 10,273 American Old-Time Tunes and read from the book,” you would be very, very wrong.
To join the jam, you need to be able to play by ear–you need to be able to wing it. You need to adapt the rules you’ve learned from other old-time tunes to this new situation.
To transfer their learning to their jobs, your learners need to be able to wing it, too. They need to apply the rules they learn from your courses to new situations that you could never foresee.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to teach people to wing it. It’s easiest to just tell them what to do, but what we need to do is to teach them how to think.
What’s wrong with telling them what to do?
Let’s say you’re writing a short course on having difficult conversations. The course is supposed to give everyone the same basic knowledge before the face-to-face training. You’re doing the section about using “I” language.
A common approach would be to write this:
Be sure to use “I” language. For example, say, “I was disappointed when you were late to the client meeting.”
This might be accompanied by a photo of someone saying, “I was worried when you didn’t respond to my emails.” And later on there’s a multiple-choice question about “I” language in which the learner chooses an “I” statement from statements that clearly aren’t “I” statements.
What’s wrong with this? It patronizes the learner. Or perhaps I should say, “I feel patronized when someone just tells me what to do and then gives me a simple quiz about it.”
I also don’t see any reason to believe that the rule is useful, plus I know that it’s never that simple in the real world. So why pay attention at all?
What’s the alternative?
Show, don’t tell. Present a scenario that has grey areas and let the learner draw a conclusion about it. Only then make your point, if necessary. Here’s one approach:
- Don’t say anything about “I” language. Instead, show a manager speaking with a team member. The manager says in a dialog bubble, “I feel frustrated when you’re so argumentative.”
- On the next screen, we see the team member saying, “Argumentative?! I’m not argumentative!”
- The manager thinks in frustration, “Why is he so mad? I used “I” language!”
So far you’ve done two things: You’ve introduced the concept of “I” language to the 3 people who have never heard of it, and you’ve demonstrated a misuse of it that makes the learner think.
Next, you could ask the learner, “What just happened?” The correct option is the point you want to make: “The manager used judgmental language instead of focusing on a specific example.”
You could then have the learner choose a different statement for the manager to say. Instead of immediately identifying a choice as “correct” or “incorrect,” you could use a short, one-screen branch to show the effect of the chosen statement on the listener. Of course, the correct option is a well phrased “I” statement that keeps the listener calm and receptive. Feedback points out why that statement worked.
And then, if you must, you could summarize what was just demonstrated about “I” language and its correct use. But by now, your learners have already drawn the right conclusions about it, and all you’re doing is reinforcing their own thoughts.
But that sounds like a lot of work!
It’s easy to list some rules on the screen and require learners to “know” them. But does simply “knowing” a rule change people’s behavior?
Instead, if we use a few more screens and a couple of photos to show the results of decisions, we’re encouraging the learners think for themselves. And conclusions that people reach on their own are far more persuasive than rules that other people give them.
Instead of passively reading a simplistic rule that rarely works simply in the real world, our learners are learning how to think about a type of situation—so they’ll be able to wing it.
What do you do to help learners learn to think? Do your stakeholders like grey areas and scenarios? Let us know in the comments.
Whew. Long post. I’m sorry I don’t have time to make it shorter. I’m very busy with client work (thanks, clients!) and travel.
The problem is that it’s as hard to teach independent learning as it is to teach creativity, or anything that’s not a solid, demonstrable skill. “All you have to do is imagine that…” “But, I can’t do that.”
I don’t mean to suggest that we teach independent *learning,* just that we let learners think for themselves while we steer them toward the right conclusion.
The “safe” approach is to just say, “You should always do X.” My point is that we involve learners more–and earn their buy-in–if we first show them the consequences of doing or not doing X.
The learner concludes from the story that they should do X when in a similar situation. We confirm that through clear feedback and, if necessary, by saying, “Therefore, you should always do X when in a similar situation.”
I’m confident that adult learners who are able to hold down a job in the corporate world are capable of drawing conclusions from focused stories. My gripe is that some corporate elearning never gives them that chance.
Bottom line, as a learner, you can’t be afraid to fail, but want to succeed. You just gotta have a place where you can go for it, and no, your banjo playing may not take you to the grand ole opry right away, but so what? You had fun and you learned. If learners are truely in an encouraging environment to share and be allowed to “wing it” in a safe environment, where failure is considered a good thing for learning, chances are much better for retention as well—at least you may learn what NOT to do. Hey, the instructor might learn something as well–such as a new way to do things… from their learners….even better!
Thanks for this great post Cathy.
I’ve been think about it today and the method of say “you should do and a or b” and then doing tests based on this could be termed the two T’s – tell and test. My question is why do you think so many people keep on going back to this approach ?
Thanks, everyone, for your comments.
Laura, I (obviously!) agree that practicing in a safe place, and being free to make mistakes, is the best way to learn. The more wrong notes I hit, the closer I get to the right one–and the more I learn about the tradition I’m trying to play. If someone just tells me what note to play, I’ve learned almost nothing.
Since elearning is all about efficiency, we don’t want to just throw learners into the deep end and watch them figure out how to swim–that takes too long. We can, however, give them a short, focused scenario to play with, along with guidance that quickly moves them to the right answer.
Robin, I think people fall back on “tell, then test” because it’s familiar and easy. It’s familiar because most of us went to schools that used that approach. And it’s easy because thinking of a story takes a few minutes longer than just writing, “Always do X.”
The cool thing is that the more you make yourself write stories, the easier they are to write.
This approach could also make us talk on a different level with our SMEs. In addition to getting the information we need, we can ask them for case studies or real-life examples. This gives us a deeper insight into the content as well as giving us ideas for scenarios.
Showing the negative fallout of doing something incorrectly or of not doing something is always more memorable. If you show a scenario where someone is in trouble for not follwoing some safety measures, the point will be driven home with greater force than if you were to show how some people followed safety measures and were thus “safe.” The latter makes for predictable scenarios and learners switch off. They are bored. Give them conflict; give them choices to make; and when they make those choices themselves, they will have made the learning their own. Application will automatically follow,
The point I am trying to make is that the scenario presented by Cathy makes for effective learning because of the grey areas in it, Sometimes, “showing” learners what not to do works much better than just “telling” them what to do. This is “Negative Knowledge” as described by Marvin Minsky in his article “Negative Expertise.”
I will tell you the one comment that comes back consistently from our learners is “the information was great but we would like to have case studies or scenarios”. Learners want to be able to relate what they are learning from their real life experiences or at least something similar. They also want to be part of the learning process. Don’t talk at them but with them and let them be part of the learning process. As Sahana said “give them choices to make themselves”. If they question something throw the question back out to the participants and let them debate the answer and come to a consensus.
“But does simply “knowing” a rule change people’s behavior?”
I think the fact that our jails are full to overflowing answers that question!
I share your frustration with the idea that dumping information on people is going to produce results. Then again, if the result we want is to be able to demonstrate that “we did our bit – just look at look at all those neatly checked boxes” then maybe we are achieving our goal!
Can’t you just picture it… “Well the problem can’t be with the training – we’ve given them all the information they need and we’ve tested them on it. The problem must lie somewhere else. Maybe they’re just lazy!”
Sahana, thanks for the reference to Marvin Minsky’s “Negative Expertise.” I liked this statement from him: “We tend to think of decision-making as positive. Yet the act of decision, which we often describe as an ‘act’ of free will, is more of a NegAct by nature, because what seems consciously to be the moment of ‘making’ the decision is actually the moment of terminating the process of considering alternatives.”
If we don’t show learners at least some alternatives and let them see why they should be ruled out, our learners can’t wing it in the real world, where the alternatives are infinite.
From Minsky’s paper I ended up at another paper, where I got this quote: “Conceiving competence as the ability to solve problems, Heid distinguishes between trivial and non-trivial competence. A case of trivial competence occurs when individuals succeed in solving a task without really knowing why. In contrast, non-trivial competence means to be able to repeatedly bring about success, because one knows about the reasons and conditions under which it is achieved.”
If any blog readers want to see the original Minsky piece, here’s the full text of “Negative Expertise”:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/NegExp.mss.txt
And here’s a paper that considers how ideas like negative expertise can be applied to professional development:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/wv488100m9u44378/fulltext.html
Melody, it’s great that your learners feel free to give you feedback and make clear what they need. As you point out, interactive scenarios make them feel part of the process, and providing some way for them to debate aspects of the course involves them even more.
Karyn, I agree that one reason we use information dumps is so we can check items off our list and dodge responsibility: “We told them not to push the red button. It’s not our fault if they didn’t listen.” To some degree, it is our fault. If minor changes would make our materials more effective but we don’t make those changes, then we can’t really blame our learners for following our example and failing to change as well.
I think that, in terms of classroom learning, the ‘information dump’ (love that phrase) approach has probably mostly been abandoned because teachers and trainers know it doesn’t work and if it rewards learners very little, it rewards teachers even less.
Online, I there is a lot of pressure to provide cheap reusable training. This leads to a form of mechanical interactivity from multiple choice quizzes, drag and drop etc which is simple to do and to grade. While these can be written to test students’ ability to apply, evaluate and synthesize ideas rather than just regurgitate them, they tend to lead to fairly simplistic dead ends which might well not make sense to learners.
The other extreme is the online learning community, where reflexive learning is supported by co-learners or a tutor or probably from both. The learning in this situation is through discussion and participation if not collaboration. This requires skilled, committed facilitators, which will make the course less ‘re-usable’ and more expensive. It is also more difficult to assess. No more “you got 67% correct, now print out your certificate”!
I’d be interested to learn how successful people have been in bridging these two extremes and to what extent the first can be made be useful.
I think “trivial competence” is an excellent distinction. I used to talk about “chimpanzee programming,” a “skill” of my own. I’d copy a chunk of job control language that I knew would accomplish X, and modify it so it’d do Y (a variation on X). Other than three arguments I knew how to change, I had no idea whatsoever what the rest of the code did.
At the same time, reinforcing your larger point, the first few times I did this and my modified code ran correctly, I could feel my synapses sit up and take notice. Hey, that really will produce this week’s report, not last week’s.
It’s how the loops gets closed — or, better, how the cycle completes one revolution — in the approach you recommend. Rather than show and tell, it’s go and show.
a big part of ‘teaching’ is facilitating others to get them to be independent learners, and in instances where you tell them what to do, you create a dependency in learning when they are later exposed to more constructivist environments, students can react with “What am I supposed to do now?” or “he/she does not teach us anything! We have to do all the work ourselves.”