Publishing in Public: The Learning-Doing Gap

Hi Learning Community,

It’s always fun writing to you, but there never seems to be enough time in the day to write all the things I want to share with you.

That’s why I will start ‘publishing’ my book in public. I'm not publishing the whole work in its entirety online, but some of the main parts of sections of the draft I’m making available to you, only here.

All I ask in return is your feedback, as you are the community I trust.

Ideas Come in Spurts

I’m not trying to force myself to a deadline, as that would destroy my creativity; I’m focused more on using time as my measurement. Consistent writing every day adds up. I may not be strictly posting every week or even every other week, but, I will do my best to post at least one portion of my book every month.

It’s only a draft

Keep in mind, this is only a draft, so it’s not a work of perfection, and it never will be, but something imperfectly published is better than perfectly unpublished. It’s not even edited.

And that’s why it’s so crucial for community feedback.

After reading this, I was hoping you could take a moment to comment on what you like/dislike/want to see more of or a gap in what I have written.

The Learning Doing Gap

How to Turn Knowledge Into Action

This book aims for leaders, teachers, students, and professional development buffs to turn their learning into practical experiences applicable to the real world.

Yes, I'm thinking about writing this book. I think about all of those classrooms out there. And all those people buying up books by the dozen and reading like crazy. But where does all that knowledge go?

After teaching for over 12 years, I discovered that most of the knowledge people learn. Just sit in the brain and go nowhere. This book aims to answer the question and give practical ways to turn what you learn into action.

People often pick up books with the idea in mind that they want to do something with that knowledge but often time. The book just sits on the shelf. Collecting dust or the person quickly reads through the book. And then practically forgets about it.

This is obviously not the original goal when the person picked up the book in the first place. Obviously, someone actively reading books wants to progress towards their goals. But it is human nature to do. What is the easiest, which sometimes means procrastinating? We're doing stuff that is more interesting than following through with what a book suggests.

So, as I'm going through the process of writing this book for you. I want to point out ways that you can prevent yourself from procrastinating and actually follow through with what you set out to do to turn your learning into action by learning by doing. There's that and also doing what you set out to learn through the books that you've read and actually doing it.

Of course, it is easy to struggle all of us do. The harder part is to get through those struggles and come out on top.

That journey typically will have at least some of the following steps:

ENABLE Mental Model

Explore your Interests

Decide if you’re interested, and decide to engage. Think of explorational learning as an active adventure.

Nurture Learning Goals

Assess your current level of competency and focus on the knowledge and skills you want to improve.

Assess Current Skills

Take part in a learning activity (classroom, eLearning, reading, etc.) to build and close knowledge gaps.

Build Through Learning Activities

Put your new knowledge to work either through rehearsal (role-play, simulation, etc.), or back on the job.

Learn by Doing?

Go out and experiment with the skills you assessed and built in the previous two steps. Examples could include building an online course, trying out for the basketball team, or building your portfolio with applicable experience.?

Evaluate Your Progress.

Reflect and assess progress to determine if a goal is met or if additional training is necessary. Repeat the process as necessary, learn from your failures, and make further improvements for your ultimate progress.

Knowledge Isn't Power

The age-old saying, "knowledge is power," doesn't always hold true. Having knowledge alone doesn't guarantee power, but taking action based on that knowledge can lead to power. So, it's not just about having knowledge, but about utilizing it effectively.

I'm questioning the quality of our education system and its goals. Students are learning about different subjects but not actually applying their knowledge. They go from one subject to another without any practical immersion. As Gregory Deihl mentioned in his book, Our Global Lingua Franca: An Educator’s Guide to Spreading English Where EFL Doesn’t Work students can learn more by immersing themselves in what they are interested in. For example, playing games where they have to interact with people from around the world or analyzing movies to improve their language skills. Both of these interests can help turn an average language learner into an avid one.

You need to know what to look for before looking for it.

This knowledge that we earn through exploration will only be valid to us if we approach it knowing that we will use it. If the knowledge is something that we are not going to use, it's not going to be valid to us. Therefore, it is easily forgettable.

Mental Obesity

A major problem is that people cannot get enough fixes from self-help books. They get stuck in the rut of reading and then not reaching any sort of satisfaction except for the fact that they completed the book. The same goes for podcasts, YouTube videos, and articles.?

Another issue with this mindset is the ‘fake it until you make it’ attitude toward professional development. Some people just don’t know what their goal is when they set out on their learning journey and, therefore, their learning lacks direction. They just read, and read, and read without making progress, meaning that nothing is done with the knowledge they take in from the books they’re reading. Eventually, they get to the point where they start to feel overwhelmed with the knowledge they have gained, but they have no idea what to do next. The cycle viciously continues as they think they might come up with a good idea, or that luck might magically come their way. If it were that easy, then all of us would be successful at what we do. Mental obesity is a problem that all of us have probably faced at least once, but it’s something that none of us should get stuck with. You will need to flush your brain out with a bit of repositioning of your mindset, like a bit of spring cleaning.

This is probably just as natural for many people as it was for me when I first started developing myself. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote this book to help you clear out some of the information you may not find useful for your progress, set your goals, and learn ways to better learn through the implementation of your learning. Let’s make you a lean, mean, learning master.

Seeking knowledge is not just about seeking knowledge for knowledge's sake but seeking specific knowledge to deal with the particular skills you are trying to improve at this moment in your life.

Learning is not linear

The reality is that any learning can start almost at any point and that it can bring you to a result at different paces and ways. Sometimes learning to do something well can take a moment while othertimes it takes years or decades to perfect. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper took him three years to complete, as paraphrased from Walter Isaacson’s master biography, he would come on days and paint for hours, while on other days he would just sit and look but not make one stroke. The most important choices and creations of your life take deliberate thinking and decision-making skills.

We can also take great inspiration from the life of Beethoven, from an amazing masterpiece of writing by Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, about Beethoven’s creative habit of keeping a notebook with him at all times. His system for capturing and developing his ideas was to save every idea or snippet of an idea in a set of notebooks that were organized based on their stage of development. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks that captured improvements of those formative ideas, and notebooks in which he fully fleshed out projects based on his initial ideas. He didn’t write in his notebooks in a linear fashion either. If little snippets from his rough idea notebook worked for a piece of music from his fully fleshed-out projects, he would adapt it. His process was continuous and novel and perhaps even worth adapting for our purposes as writers, thinkers, educators, professionals, and learners for life.

There is no one right way to get the results you want. The ENABLE mental model can be started at any point along with the framework. For example, you could immediately go over to ‘Assess’ part on the model which allows you to build your skills by doing learning activities. This is especially true if you already know what your interests are, what you are good at, and what you know you want to accomplish.

My main point is to use this mental model as a general guide to improving the way you take action on what you learn. Use it in the way that works best for you. Don't just start from the beginning and blindly work your way to the end if that's not what the situation calls for.

As you may have experienced in your life, things you learn or experience now may not seem that important or useful in the moment, but through the gradual building of knowledge and experience, you may find that a particular piece fits perfectly where you wouldn’t have expected. Like Beethoven, you can save the knowledge you learn and experience for the right time. This doesn’t mean you learn for the sake of learning, though. You have to be strategic.

To be continued…

Take a moment to write your thoughts about the concept of the book so far.

• What do you like or dislike about it?
• What other sections might you like to see in the book?