Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight – how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach.
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Carl Rogers
We hear a lot about Learning to Learn (L2L) these days and frankly it is not surprising – the only surprising aspect being that talk of this has only surfaced relatively recently.
Only a generation ago, children left school expecting to pursue a career that would remain largely stable until retirement, learning was reserved for school, apprenticeships and on-the-job training, learning was considered to be over after this period.
Gender roles were firmly fixed in the male going out to work whilst the female stayed at home, raising children and managing the household and perhaps taking on part-time work when the children grew up.
University was reserved, mostly for the middle to upper classes, apart from those who attended night school in order to advance themselves in their professional lives, although this was a relative minority occurrence.
The idea of mature students was virtually unknown until the 80′s in the UK, where it was considered the reserve of the fringes of society and definitely not yet in the mainstream.
The 21st century has brought about a revolution in work-life and consequently in learning.
Gone are the days of stable work, where people stay in the same company, and even the same job, from leaving school to retirement, replaced by portfolio careers, periods of retraining and reconversion to new professions and jobs.
The changes are happening before our eyes, in terms of technology, which has a direct knock-on effect to work, to the way we work and consequently, to learning.
Changes in work life include flexible working, networking, job-sharing and distance working – all enabled, at least in part, by advances in technology, which necessitates not only enhanced technical skills but puts a huge premium on the ability to communicate effectively.
Today is not about keeping up, but rather staying ahead of the trends and changes – the ability to second-guess and to prepare for what is on the horizon gives the edge to anyone in the job market.
The ability to learn faster than your competitor may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
It is easy to understand that bodies of knowledge, rote learning and information-transfer will no longer prepare people for the changes that are inevitable in their careers, which will also make a distinction between people who possess basic skills to those who are able to actively mobilise their core skills in order to learn new skills, techniques and knowledge – this is what is termed, Learning to Learn.
The question remains as to whether we are equipping our people with the skills to adapt to change, in schools, universities, business and life in general.
Sure, there are campaigns to inject some sort of impetus into learning, but there remains little evidence of a concerted structural change in learning and education in Western Europe towards a system that equips people with the skills to learn how to learn, which is the only way, in my opinion to facilitate adaptability, resilience and acceptance of the inevitable change that will happen during life.
A lifelong-learner needs the following assets in order to effectively learn to learn.
The campaign for learning in the UK, identifies the 5 Rs of Learning to Learn:
Readiness – which includes motivation, self evaluation, goal setting and managing the learning process
Reflectiveness – Observation, taking a step back, making connections, evaluating learning, using different learning approaches.
Resourcefulness – Exploiting learning styles, using learning tools, information search, communication, applying learning.
Resilience – Optimism, self-belief, using different techniques and tools when needed.
Responsibility – Doing a SWOT analysis on one’s own learning process, taking ownership, panning and target setting, consultation with others, collaboration.
Maslow suggested a matrix involving 4 stages of learning (from Wikipaedia) :
- Unconscious Incompetence
- The individual neither understands nor knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit, nor has a desire to address it.
- Conscious Incompetence
- Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.
- Conscious Competence
- The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.
- Unconscious Competence
- The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes “second nature” and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply).
Certain brain personality types favor certain skills (see the Benziger theory), and each individual possesses different natural strengths and preferences.
Therefore, advancing from, say, stage 3 to 4 in one skill might be easier for one person than for another. Certain individuals will even resist progression to stage 2, because they refuse to acknowledge or accept the relevance and benefit of a particular skill or ability.
Individuals develop competence only after they recognize the relevance of their own incompetence in the skill concerned.
Many attempts have been made to add to this competence model.
This addition would be a fifth stage, and there have been many different suggestions for what this fifth stage would be called.
One suggestion is that it be called “Conscious competence of unconscious competence”.
This would describe a person’s ability to recognize and develop unconscious competence in others.In order to be able to effectively learn in the 21st century, we must strive to become lifelong learners who are able to learn how to learn.
Sounds very glib, I grant you, but the ability to learn to learn necessitates that we get to know ourselves better, our preferred learning styles, the way our memory works, how we prefer to receive information, our strong and weak point, opportunities and threats to our potential to learn, which involves Metacognition – basically thinking about thinking.
We could question the potential of learning in terms of the breakneck speed that information reaches us today – some would question the need to wade through books and texts for information when they can do quick, targeted keyword searches and access exactly what they want in seconds?
Does this mean that any background and peripheral information is discounted – effectively going for direct access and ignoring connections?
This appears to be in opposition to how our brains work, as learning is constructed through connections, and this appears to short-circuit many of the aspects of learning to learn, reducing L2L to fast-food learning.
Another question would be, “How do we slow things down enough to enable real, meaningful and deep learning to take place”?
Some final questions:
Has Learning to Learn come to the end of its ephemeral life to be replaced by direct-access, fast-food learning?
I believe the answer to these questions are that learning to learn is pretty much here to stay and that there is a gulf of difference between accessing and finding information and actually Learning.
To return briefly to the title of this post, the point of learning to learn is that it is the (only) way to be prepared for what is to come and to be armed to adapt and to learn new skills to stay ahead of the game.
What do you think.
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