To Practise is to Learn

We need more opportunity to practise at work

Learning in organisations must change. As learners, we want it to be more personal, more available and more interactive. And organisations want it to lead to real behavioural change. Practice is the most effective way of changing behaviour.  

Combining these therefore, we need practice to become more personal, available and interactive. 

This article presents some thoughts on the changing face of learning and why organisations need to place practice at the forefront of their learning offer.

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

THE CHANGING FACE OF LEARNING

For too long, both in education and workplace learning, we have taken a top-down, trainer-knows-best approach, which places the trainer as the decision-maker for what you need to learn, how and when. We have also come from the position that it is sufficient to tell people what they need to know – ie learning as knowledge transfer. But the more we understand what learning is and the more we look at our existing models for learning, the more we realise that we have got these wrong. 

We need to change the way we design and deliver learning in the workplace so that it leads to changes in behaviour; if behaviour doesn’t change, we should conclude that people haven’t learnt.

Recent research (City and Guilds) proposes that learning needs to be:

1. Personal – This means there must be choice over what is learnt and how. It also means that we should avoid sheep-dipping people through courses, but must tailor the learning to their needs, their role and the things they need and want to change 
2. Available – It should be accessible at the place of need and at the time of need. Ideally, it should be available just before that learning needs to be used for real, so that it is both useful and immediately reinforced
3. Interactive – Learning happens when individuals try things out, fail, get feedback, try again, do it better and feel great about it.

We must change learning at work, or continue to spend money on delivering courses which tick boxes, but change very little.

HOW WE LEARN

How People Learn, by Nick Shackleton-Jones challenged me to think differently about how people really learn and therefore how we should help them to learn at work. 

One of Nick's key propositions is the Affective Context Model of learning. This proposes that we remember (and therefore learn) from our reactions to the things we see, hear and experience. We can then recreate the learning from the memory of the reaction. 

So, one of my twin sons recently learned not to touch pots on the stove – He touched it; it hurt; he remembers that reaction (and my own!!) and can access the learning that we discussed afterwards. Interestingly, his twin brother also learned the same lesson through his reaction to seeing his twin hurt (without having to hurt his own hand).

When we care about something, when it matters to us, we will have a stronger reaction to information related to that; we will remember those reactions and learn from them. So, if I care about negotiating well with a customer (because it means I get a good deal), then I will react positively and strongly to information and experiences about negotiation, I remember them and I learn. Also, I need fairly simple inputs to help me as I really want to do well.

This is how we have been learning for millennia and how we will always learn. Unfortunately, education has taken the position that learning is achieved through transferring knowledge, or facts, from one person’s head into another’s. This can be achieved, but only when our reaction to that sort of knowledge transfer is the fear we have of not remembering those facts when preparing for an exam!

SO, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR LEARNING DESIGN?

It means that we should focus our efforts on creating two types of learning resources (note, resources not courses) – one for when people already care about the thing they need to learn, and one for when they need to learn, but don’t yet care enough. These can be termed pull and push learning (Shackleton-Jones, 2019)

Pull learning (I care about it)

• We have access to all the knowledge we need right there in our pockets, on our phones
• If I want to know how to do something because I care about it, I will actively Google it, Alexa it, or Siri it
• The best tools for me to find to help me are simple checklists, Top Tips, short video explainers, or practice opportunities.

Push learning (I don’t care about it enough, yet)

• Where we want people to learn stuff they don’t yet care about, we need to help them to care
• Give someone a chance to do something, feel what that’s like, maybe not quite get it right, and they will begin to care about it
• And they will care even more when they get feedback about how they did and have the opportunity to practise it again.

We must therefore create opportunities for people to practise as this leads to behaviour change and works for both pull and push learning situations.

Practice leads to improvement

We have all heard about Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice, but whilst that is (arguably) what it takes to become a top expert in something, for the rest of us the difference between ‘can’t do it’ and ‘I'm quite good at this’ is probably more like 20 hours.

For sportspeople and musicians, training is practice. You may have a coach, or teacher help you, but it's practice – combined with great feedback – that makes all the difference for improvement. Think Beckham staying after training to practise that free-kick again and again.

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But what happens at work? What do we do to help our managers and leaders to improve?

We go on a course, we read a book, we do some e-learning and we try and take on board that knowledge. Then we go into the meeting, negotiation, coaching session with one of our colleagues and we ‘fail live’, because that new behavior isn’t as easy for us to put into practice as it sounded when we learnt about it. At which point we are either aware of how badly we have done, or we are not. Even if we are aware, it is really difficult for us to know why we failed, because we only really have our own limited, and biased, view of what we did.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could practise any interaction we wanted, get feedback, try again and know that we had done it better the third time than the first?

How would it feel to have improved like that?

The right sort of practice? Exactly like the real thing

For practice to be effective it should be the right sort of practice – every golfer knows that practice swings on a driving range are very different to playing off variable surfaces, under varying conditions, on a real course.

So, the right sort of practice for improving communication skills and person to person interactions are practice opportunities between two people in which the focus is the communication (!).

Effective practice is:

• A close replication of a real situation. So having a live actor who can change their style to best simulate the person in the ‘real’ situation is highly effective for learning.
• Challenging, in a safe environment. Practice is about a place of safety to try, fail, try again and improve. But for learning to occur, the situation should also be challenging. An actor can react to the learner and turn up the emotional content as and when required to increase reaction to the experience and therefore improve the learning
• Nuanced. It is in our ‘micro-expressions’ that we give ourselves away. They can be the flicker of an eyebrow, a tiny upcurl of a lip, or a widening of the eye. They are so small that we are mostly not aware of having perceived them consciously, but our sub-conscious emotional antenna sees them and reacts to them. Actors are trained to both use and observe these micro-expressions and can therefore help to improve a learner’s emotional intelligence
• Building confidence. Going back to the golfer, when you have had a bad practice session, it affects your confidence and will affect your performance. A live actor, can tune and adjust their performance so that the learner really feels that they are performing better at the end of the practice session. The learner can therefore take this confidence into the real situation.

Photo by David Goldsbury on Unsplash

So, I believe that we should be designing opportunities to practise into the flow of our work. That means not taking people out for a day to run 'triad' style role-plays in the classroom, but by giving people the time, space and place to practise right there in their working day.

I would love to hear what you think.

Phil Allen

www.practiceroomonline.com