Liza Donnelly opened the FocusOn Learn conference with stories from her career as a cartoonist. With a very personal and compelling story illustrated by her cartoons and some live drawing, she unpacked creativity and innovation. With lessons about commitment and meaning, it was a really nice kickoff to the event.
Been thinking about how to generate meaningful learning in optimal (read: concise but effective) ways. And a lot of what I’ve been thinking about involves contextualized meaningful practice (no surprise there, eh?). So how might this play out? Thought I’d use a story to convey the experience I’m thinking of:
Pat logs on to the system, and notes that it’s time to take a crack at the next assignment. In it is a setup with a role for Pat to play. The story details a business situation: the organization, it’s current status, and a situation that’s occurred that requires an action. The details are exaggerated, so it’s a dire situation with a lot riding on the outcome. The instructions are phrased in the form of an email directly from the CEO, with pointers to some folks to talk to for assistance.
The necessity is for Pat to create a plan to address the need. In this case, it’s a marketing plan for a new product that has been the focus of most of the organization’s effort. With old products facing receding sales, this product has to succeed. The existing plan, legacy of a departed individual, is ‘old school’ and an up-to-date approach is needed. The indicated need is heavily aligned with this week’s topic of social-media marketing.
Pat starts work to create a document to send to the CEO. This includes making ‘calls’ (viewing videos of quick messages from the various roles involved including the product manager, the financial officer) to find out the parameters which are in play and to get expert knowledge. There are also some marketing materials available.
In previous assignments there were support tools about creating documents and about marketing plans, but this time such support isn’t available. Pat realizes that this being a more advanced cut through the topic, it’s time to start taking ownership of the process. The CEO has asked for an interim plan report before creating the entire marketing plan, and Pat uses previous materials and adapts them to create the plan.
Pat will get feedback from the CEO to incorporate in the plan before putting together the final submission. Ultimately, the success of the plan will be presented, and then feedback on the details of Pat’s submission. The document creation will be evaluated separately and in the context of previous documents required across this particular topic and previous ones, while the marketing plan itself will be evaluated in terms of it’s response to the context.
Several things to note here. The contextualized performance requirement isn’t unique, of course. This very much draws upon similar work seen in Roger Schank’s Story-Centered Curriculum and Goal-Based Scenarios. It differs in that subsequent assignments might use totally separate story settings. It’s similar also to work like Bransford, et al’s Anchored Instruction. The notion of embedding performance in context reflects research that shows abstract instruction doesn’t transfer as well. My own proposal (research, anyone?) is that the story should complete before the conceptual feedback is presented, or indeed that the story outcome includes the conceptual feedback in an intrinsic way.
The second important thing is that the document creation details are assessed separately, and tracked across other such assignments that might appear anywhere. The point is to develop meta-skills like digital document creation (and others such as presentations, working in groups, research, etc) as well as the domain skills.
I believe that we need learners to create complex work products that are challenging to auto-mark, because the outcomes are necessary. This means that you need people in the learning loop; totally asynchronous isn’t going to work to develop rich capabilities. I’m trying to figure out ways to approximate that with as little human intervention as possible because pragmatically we have more learning to achieve than we have resources to achieve that (at least until we get our priorities right ;).
I’m a fan of the power of social learning. When people get together (and the process is managed right), the outcomes of a negotiated understanding can be powerful. However, in designing learning, working in groups has some real negative perceptions and realities. The open question is: what to do?
The problems are well-known. As my kids complained, on group projects some team members will reliably slack, letting the most driven student do the work. Even with a commitment, there can be differences in working style: getting started early versus preferring to do it under pressure.
Some things have been tried. When I assigned group projects, I told my students I expected them to do equal work, and would grade accordingly. If it didn’t end up being the case, they were to each write up a report on what each team member did, including themselves. Others require this, regardless, and that sounds like a smart way to make concrete a requirement for contribution.
One thing to be addressed is invigilation. Is the work being tracked in any way? If they’re working in a collaborative environment that tracks contributions via versioning or some other way, then there’s a trail of work that can be scrutinized. Extra work, to be sure, but it’d serve as a tie-breaker if there was some question about contribution.
Another issue is support for working in groups. When I first assigned group work, it became clear that they didn’t know how (?!?!). So I wrote up a little guide to doing group work, and those problems subsided. Working together is a skill that shouldn’t be taken for granted. There should be some explicit statement of expectations if you can’t determine whether there’s reliable prior experience. (Certainly, it seems that the teachers weren’t providing guidance or oversight, in the case of my kids.)
As an aside: make sure the students know why you’re asking them to work in groups. I’ve learned that learners will be much more willing to undertake what you assign if you explain the rationale that justifies your choice!
Then there’s them question of just when group work makes sense. Given that the value-added benefit is the negotiated understanding, it would make sense to do that when the material is complex, and there’s a risk of an individual taking a unique, incomplete, and or imperfect understanding. At times when you want to assess an individual’s ability to deliver, you wouldn’t want a group project!
There’s also the issue of the nature of the task. Are you just having them come to a shared understanding in representing their thinking (e.g. a response to a question) or actually produce a work product of some sort (a video, presentation, report, etc). If you can get what you need with less effort, you shouldn’t assign a more complex project.
Which brings up the issue of the scope of the work. I would expect that the more imposing the total amount of work is, the more it would invoke those with time or effort concerns to be lulled to the lazy side. Keeping the scope small might contribute to a greater willingness to participate.
Breaking up the deliverables is one way to manage student effort. If you have interim deliverables, it helps manage the process and the time. Certainly, early in a curriculum, you could provide this scaffolding (and make it explicit), and then gradually hand off responsibility for the learners to internalize the self-management. (Meta-learning!)
Breaking it up can also manage to address the contribution. If individual submissions are required before group ones, you can at least have the learners having had to contribute thought before sharing and creating a greater understanding.
Finally, there’s the issue of group work in an independent schedule. In a cohort model (scheduled timetable) it’s easy, but otherwise, how do you do it? If there’s ‘critical mass’, you can have learners arrange to meet with anyone available. If there’re more, you could even have them indicate working style preferences: quick, early, what media channels. Otherwise, it’s more challenging (or a non-issue, just don’t do it).
There are lots of issues and potential solutions for addressing group work. I can’t say I’ve found an easy solution, despite having wrestled with it. I think it’s important, so I’m curious what you’ve tried and found out!
At an event the other evening, showing various career technology tools, someone said something that I thought was just wrong. I asked afterwards, and then explained why I thought it was wrong. The response was “well, there can be different ways to go about it”. And frankly, there really can’t. Think for yourself about why I might say so, and then let me show you why.
The trigger was a design program talking about their design courses. And the representative was saying that once a learner had created a project, it was shown to everybody. Which sounds good, since ‘sharing is caring’, or at least it’s a good example of working out loud. And, in general, this is a good idea. But I think it’s not in learning.
In brainstorming (e.g. informal learning), we know that sharing before others have had their chance to think, it can color their output. This limits the exploration of the total possible space of opportunities that would come from a diverse team. Hearing another response likely will limit that spaces that might get explored. Instead, the goal is to diverge before converging.
And so, too, in learning. I’ve argued for assignment submission systems that only allow you to see the other submissions once you’ve submitted your own. Until you’ve struggled yourself with the challenge, you won’t get the most out of seeing how others have solved the situation.
If you immediately share the first submission, it may affect those who aren’t that far along yet. Some may even end up holding off to see what others do! This undermines the integrity of the assignment. One explanation that was given was to provide guidance to others, but that, to me, is the role of the assignment specification.
There is, however, real value in seeing the other submissions once you’ve completed yours. Seeing other approaches helps broaden the understanding. Better yet is to have discussion on them, as when critiquing others (constructively) you internalize the monitoring. This discussion also provides the opportunity to experiment with working out loud that eventually develops good working habits.
(I’ve similarly argued, by the way, that ‘rollover’ questions -where the answer is shown once you move your pointer over the question- don’t lead to any meaningful learning. If you haven’t made the mental effort to commit to a response, it won’t stick as well.)
So I believe that, if you’re developing people’s ability to do, you have a responsibility to do so in the most advantageous way. That includes making effort to use the best approach to sharing assignments. I was surprised (and dismayed) to see someone arguing to the contrary! I implore you to do the details on the approaches you work, for your learners’, and the learning’s, sake.
So I presented on innovation to the local ATD chapter a few weeks ago, and they did an interesting and nice thing: they got the attendees to document their takeaways. And I promised to write a blog post about it, and I’ve finally received the list of thoughts, so here are my reflections. As an aside, I’ve written separate articles on L&D innovation recently for both CLO magazine and the Litmos blog so you can check those out, too.
I started talking about why innovation was needed, and then what it was. They recalled that I pointed out that by definition an innovation is not only a new idea, but one that is implemented and leads to better results. I made the point that when you’re innovating, designing, researching, trouble-shooting, etc, you don’t know the answer when you start, so they’re learning situations, though informal, not formal. And they heard me note that agility and adaptation are premised on informal learning of this sort, and that the opportunity is for L&D to take up the mantle to meed the increasing need.
There was interest but some lack of clarity around meta-learning. I emphasize that learning to learn may be your best investment, but given that you’re devolving responsibility you shouldn’t assume that individuals are automatically possessed of optimal learning skills. The focus then becomes developing learning to learn skills, which of needs is done across some other topic. And, of course, it requires the right culture.
There were some terms they heard that they weren’t necessarily clear on, so per the request, here are the terms (from them) and my definition:
I used the Learning Organization Dimensions diagram (Garvin, Edmondson & Gino) to illustrate the components of successful innovation environment, and these were reflected in their comments. A number mentioned psychological safety in particular as well as the other elements of the learning environment. They also picked up on the importance of leadership.
Some other notes that they picked up on included:
One that was provided that I know I didn’t say because I don’t believe it, but is interesting as a comment:
“Belonging trumps diversity, and security trumps grit”
This is an interesting belief, and I think that’s likely the case if it’s not safe to experiment and make mistakes.
They recalled some of the books I mentioned, so here’s the list:
It was a great evening, and really rewarding to see that many of the messages stuck. So, what are your thought around innovation?
In my inbox was an announcement about a new white paper with the intriguing title Human Learning is About to Change Forever. So naturally I gave up my personal details to download a copy. There are nine claims in the paper, from the obvious to the ridiculous. So I thought I’d have some fun.
First, let’s get clear. Our learning runs on our brain, our wetware. And that’s not changing in any fundamental way in the near future. As a famous article once had it: phenotypic plasticity triumphs over genotypic plasticity (in short, our human advantage has gained via our ability to adapt individually and learn from each other, not through species evolution). The latter takes a long time!
And as a starting premise, the “about to” bit implies these things are around the corner, so that’s going to be a bit of my critique. But nowhere near all of it. So here’s a digest of the nine claims and my comments:
Overall, this is reads like more a sci-fi fan’s dreams than a realistic assessment of what we should be preparing for. No, human learning isn’t going to change forever. The ways we learn, e.g. the tools we learn with are changing, and we’re rediscovering how we really learn.
There are better guides available to what’s coming in the near term that we should prepare for. Again, we need to focus on good learning design, and leveraging technology in ways that align with how our brains work, not trying to meld the two. So, there’re my opinions, I welcome yours.
Jane Hart is running her annual Top 100 Tools for Learning poll (you can vote too), and here’s my contribution for this year. These are my personal learning tools, and are ordered according to Harold Jarche’s Seek-Sense-Share models, as ways to find answers, to process them, and to share for feedback:
Those are my tools, now what are yours? Use the link to let Jane know, her collection and analysis of the tools is always interesting.
I’m going a bit out on a limb here, with a somewhat heretical statement: what you learn is more important than how you learn! (You could say pedagogy supersedes curricula, but that’s just being pedantic. ;) And I’m pushing the boundaries of the concept a bit, but I think it’s worth floating as an idea. It’s meta-learning, of course, learning how to learn! The important point is to focus on what’s being developed. And I mean this at two levels.
This was triggered by seeing two separate announcements of new learning opportunities. Both are focused on current skills, so both are focusing on advanced curricula, things that are modern. While the pedagogy of one isn’t obvious (though claimed to be very practical), the other clearly touts the ways in which the learning happens. And it’s good.
So the pedagogy is very hands on. In fact, it’s an activity-based curricula (in my terms), in that you progress by completing assignments very closely tied to what you’ll do on the job. There are content resources available (e.g. expert videos) and instructor feedback, all set in a story. And this is better than a content-based curricula, so this pedagogy is really very apt for preparing people to do jobs. In fact, they are currently applying it across three different roles that they have determined are necessary.
But if you listen to the longer version (video) of my activity-based learning curricula story, you’ll see I carry the pedagogy forward. I talk about handing over responsibility to the learner, gradually, to take responsibility for the activities, content, product, and reflection. This is important for learners to start becoming self-improving learners. The point is to develop their ability to do meta-learning.
To do so, by the way, requires that you make your pedagogy visible for the choices that you made, and why. Learners, to adopt their own pedagogy, need to see a pedagogy. If you narrate your pedagogy, that is document your alternatives and rationales of choices, they can actually understand more about the learning process itself.
And this, to me, is the essence of the claim. If you start a learning process about something, and then hand off responsibility for the learning, while making clear the choices that led there, learners become self-learners. The courses that are designed in the above two cases will, of necessity, change. And graduates from those courses might be out of date before long, unless they’ve learned how to stay current. Unless they’ve learned meta-learning. That can be added in, and it may be implicit, but I’ll suggest that learning to learn is a more valuable long-term outcome than the immediate employability.
So that’s my claim: in the long term, the learner (and society) will be better off if the learner can learn to self-improve. It’s not an immediate claim or benefit, but it can be wrapped around something that is of immediate benefit. It’s the ‘secret sauce’ that organizations could be adding in, whether internally or in their offerings. What surprises me is how seldom I see this approach taken, or even discussed.
I wrote an article for Jane Hart’s Modern Workplace Learning magazine, triggered by my thought that in her tools survey, I didn’t see a lot about a certain set of reflection (c.f. last weeks posts on diagramming) and experimentation tools: meta-learning tools. In particular, for the latter, I wondered about what there was to track your own learnings. And Jane commented to me that she knew of one, and I was reminded of more.
Now, I don’t know much about any of these, but she mentioned PebblePad, and I noted that I’ve talked with Degreed before, and saw that HT2 has a tool called Red Panda. And I think this could become an interesting area. Coupled with tools that support learning streams, personal learning could be boosted.
So tools like Axonify, Anders Pink, and EdCast all have varying models about making knowledge available and streaming bits and pieces over time. They’re pull as well, but for one definition of microlearning (that of streaming small bits over time to develop, e.g. slow learning), they could be a valuable part of personal development.
If we then track our learnings (and not just what’s through the tool, but other things we do such as attending events, interviewing people, etc), we can maintain ourselves on a path to efficacy. That is, if we’ve registered goals, and broken it up into steps, and track our progress (and reward ourselves), we have a higher likelihood of continuing our improvement.
What I haven’t seen, as yet, and think could be an important part of this, is layering on additional support for learning itself, meta-learning. For each type of learning activity, there could be support for doing that well, including setting and reviewing learning paths.
There’s more pressure for individuals to take responsibility for their own learning (as well as for enlightened organizations that want to support learning). So we need to be getting systematic about not only support for the content, but also for the process. This provides the opportunity is to accelerate the process. And our success.
So yesterday I talked about the value of diagrams, but I thought I’d add a bit about the process of actually creating diagrams. Naturally, I created a diagram about it.
I created this diagram for a session I ran on diagramming a number of years ago. In that session I talked about our cognitive architecture, why we need models, how diagrams work, properties and design issues, and more. At the end, I proposed a potential process for it. It captures an ideal picture of how diagramming could work.
So, you need to know the elements of the model you want to relate, identify the relationships, and any dimensions that characterize differences between the elements. Then you have to choose how you’re going to represent them: shape, color, weight, font, and more.
With your elements, you can then place them, connect them, and add the visual coding. Then, of course, you tune.
This is an ideal process, but in reality it’s much more flexible, at least when I’m creating a model as a way of understanding. I typically iterate, creating placeholder elements, and moving them around until I think I have the right ones. Then I go about connecting them to make sure I have the relationships right. Then I work on adding dimensions, and colors, and aligning them, and grouping them, and… Except that I might add some elements, then group, or connect, then add more, and… it’s a very iterative process. It’s a creative process that involves lots of experimentation, revision, and more.
Sometimes, I even use a diagram and then realize it’s not working and revise it. So, for instance, I blogged about a representation of social process. I got some feedback that it wasn’t very clear. So, I made a second stab at it, and I think it worked better. Certainly, I continue to use it without complaints.
And I’m the first to admit that my diagrams may not look as good as the ones that professional graphic designers could create, but they’re good enough (and OmniGraffle does a good job of making it easy for me to make them up to a standard I think is at least acceptable and useful; it’s probably overkill but I’ve stuck with it for years now). And that’s the point. If they help you think better, it’s good enough. If it helps you communicate effectively with someone else, even better. Diagrams are cognitive tools, offloading conceptual complexity to graphic relationships and visual processing. And with the complex problems we increasingly face, I reckon the more tools the better.