When you need to learn something, that's when you actually remember it. So we get all kinds of information and data flowing out of.
All throughout our lives, day in, day out. And the only stuff we actually remember is what we actually needed to remember in the moment. Everything else is just stored away, somewhere that we can never go back and access because there's too much information for us. And so if we learn things right when we need it, then it, it takes care of everything else that we're trying to do.
We are inundated by information. We learn best when we actually need to learn something.
Our entire system of education has it backwards, and so that makes things not work effectively.
Our system is set up with "someone" determining what we should learn. When that someone determines what we should learn, they also determine how we should learn it.
While this may work well for the learning theorists out there who like to spend more time talking about learning than actually doing it, it doesn't work well for you or me.
When it comes down to it, the only person ever truly responsible for learning is the individual.
The role of teachers has been to dispense information, but I don't believe that is the role of a truly great teacher.
A truly great teacher helps learners uncover the knowledge they seek. They help them find it when they have met the end of their ability.
When the student is ready, the master will appear. Alternately attributed to Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni or the Theosophists.
A truly great teacher is not a dispenser of information, but a compass that helps people find their way when they get off course from what they need.
This approach is valuable because as I mentioned, the learner is the only who can be responsible for what she or he learns.
We have a fundamental flaw in how we think education should happen. Education doesn't really happen in group settings. It always, always happens with the individual.
Learning always happens with the individual.
It doesn't matter if there's a thousand people in the room or one, every person is going to have their own unique learning experience related to whatever that event is.
If you walk in and say, I need everybody to do this and learn this certain standard, you've lost the battle. Instead, what you have to recognize is that every person is coming in and you need to challenge each one of them to get the learning that they need from whatever happens in that environment.
And sometimes that means you're not in the right place and you need to go somewhere else and get that learning in a different situation.
This approach changes things, though, and change can be tough.
First, you recognize that your role as an educator is different. It is not to get people to reach a certain proficiency on a certain standard or achieve some specific goal.
But your goal is rather to help them get better in the way that they need. You both walk away learning so much more. And the teacher learns how to facilitate things better.
The moments of awareness and understanding happen more quickly, and more often, and what the learner learns is that they are in a safe place for them to learn what it is that they need to learn. Even if it doesn't perfectly align with what the instructor thought should have happened.
I've learned that if I can get middle schoolers, who are totally governed by hormones to excel with just-in-time learning, we can get anyone to excel with this approach.
We need a few things:
Enrollment
First, we have ruined the term enrollment. Seth Godin says that we have made it mean that you have signed a paper saying you'll attend school or your parents will go to jail. It's so much more than that. Listen to Seth explain it himself:
Learners have to want to learn. If they don't want to learn, it doesn't matter what you have to teach them. They may hear and may even remember some things, but they won't truly learn it.
Understanding
Learners need to understand that they are responsible for their learning. It's not the teacher's job to ensure they learn, it's their responsibility as the learner.
No assessment in the world can measure everything we know and have learned. It can only measure what it is designed to measure.
But, a learner can articulate things they have learned in a way that nobody else can prove or disprove. And often, they can't (and shouldn't) articulate things in the manner in which they show up in the standards.
Teachers can make that translation from learning to standards proficiency, and that's a good thing.
Compulsory education teaches us that it is the teacher's job to make students learn, which brings up the advice I got too late in my teaching career: Never work harder than your students.
Compulsory education forces teachers to work harder than their students.
Release of Power
When I am coaching principals, as I do each week, I don't have an agenda for what they should learn. But they learn something new every week. They find VALUE in our time spent together. In fact, I've collected their responses to that very question each week for the last several months.
When they determine what they are learning, they learn greater things than we could have mapped out in a lesson plan.
And this works with kids, adults, anyone.
Here's a story to illustrate this. My daughter wanted to learn multiplication. I "taught" her in the traditional way that most teachers would: "It's repeated addition, so just adding over and over again, and here's a multiplication chart, memorize it."
She came back a few minutes later, and triumphantly said, "I figured it out. 12 x 13 is 156."
You see, she didn't want to learn multiplication, she wanted to learn what she needed in the moment. Despite my foolishness, she learned multiplication at a higher level than I had. If that were a subject in math, they would have stopped at 12x12 and been fine with that. Perhaps they would have taught how to work it out on paper, but the goal of the education system is not teach multiplication.
Example: Her 3rd grade math standard would have stopped her at 100: Use multiplication and division within 100 to solve word problems in situations involving equal groups, arrays, and measurement quantities, e.g., by using drawings and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem. Source
I'm sure you, the one who is reading this, would have been a good teacher and would encourage her, but they certainly wouldn't take much time away from other students who are still working within the grade level standard of within 100.
When you give up this power, it's much easier to say, "what are you doing to make things better? And how do you need our support?"
Expectation of Learning
If learners believe that this time is going to be a waste of time, that is probably what is going to happen.
This is a mindset issue. You can learn in any situation you are in. Boring class? I can learn something.
This quote is talking about Sunday School in a church setting, but it shows the power of the learning mindset that you can learn anything anywhere: "Someone asked President Spencer W. Kimball (1895–1985), 'What do you do when you find yourself in a boring sacrament meeting?' His answer was a little surprising: 'I don’t know. I’ve never been in one.'" Source
You have to have an expectation that you're going to be able to learn something from the best teacher out there from the worst teacher out there and from everybody else who's in the room with you.
Individual Learning Plans
In cooperation with learners, teachers need to make individual learning plans that will help them figure out what they need to learn.
Sometimes, this is challenging, and that is mostly because learners often don't have the language to describe what they need to learn because they don't know it yet!
I find the easier way to approach this is for the learner to be engaged in a project of some sort, and then the teacher can follow them to define what it was they learned as a part of that process.
So, does this apply to adult learners as well? It sure does! Let's look at a work situation.
If somebody can do their job without learning anything, they are basically a factory worker and assembly line person. And they're just doing the same thing over and over again. They need to learn the basic skills, and then just repeat them.
Now, if that's what you are aiming for, that's all well and good. Keep doing it.
But if there are ways that you want people to be more creative and solve more problems, then they have to be learning things while they're doing their jobs!
If they finished a project and did not learn anything during that project, they're in the wrong position, they need more responsibility and more opportunity to learn and grow.
And that's the other way, back door, make sure that learning happens in an organization. You give them responsibilities above their capability currently so that they can grow into the kind of person that they can be.
The problem with our traditional approach of making it easy and ticking off standards by direct instruction in lessons is that we want learners to pass off a certain number of standards or objectives in a certain timeframe.
When you take that expectation away and ask them to learn what they need to get the job done, their learning just skyrockets. Talk about a hockey stick curve.
It's just incredible because you learn so much faster, so much more deeper.
How Salesflare Taught me Effectively
I recently started using this program called Salesflare (a CRM), and the way that I learned how to use it was that they gave me a seven day free trial and they said to unlock more days, do these things.
And when you need to unlock more days on the trial, you have to do these simple things and there are tutorials that you can read or that you can watch a video on to know how to do those specific things.
Now I became highly motivated because I wanted to use this tool and I got some extended benefit.
By opening up some days of the trial that really helped me learn, have an incentive, and provide me with what I needed to learn just in time. The software was complex enough that they needed to teach me, but not so complex that I could have just figured it out if I really needed to.
Human-Centered Approaches
Sometimes, learners are not ready to learn what we think they need. We need to remember that learners are humans!
I had a teacher who was just amazing up to a point. And then she stopped. And the point at which she stopped was because she was going through a divorce with her husband and her kids were really struggling with that.
Instead of pushing her to be better, I focused on just helping her deal with the learning that she needed through that trial she was experiencing. She didn't become a better that year, but she did learn a lot. I couldn't count it on her evaluation because the evaluation was approaching it wrong.
She was still coming to work. She was still doing good enough, but she wasn't at the level that she should have been in my eyes because of the potential that I saw in her.
And so rather than saying, why aren't you getting better? I just recognized that she was still struggling with this home issue that was taking her time and attention and she could coast at work for a little while.
And I could be okay with that. Once she was through that hard part, she got back on the horse and keep riding higher up the hill. And, here's the bonus, while the things she learned from the divorce didn't make her a better teacher according to our rubric of good teaching, the things she learned made her a better teacher for our students and what they were going through.