From Uncertainty to Insight: Perspectives on Crafting Effective Learning Experiences (from my personal journey)
Dear reader,
Have you ever found yourself inadequately equipped to fulfil your work responsibilities? That’s how I felt when I first started designing programmes. Where do I even start!?
Here I will share some of my personal learnings with you on how I navigated through this ‘gap’, and offer tips for facilitators who are embarking on a similar journey.
I started as a facilitator, following the facilitating guide for a pre-designed program. However, when I transitioned into a role that involved design work, I faced a new challenge. While I had experience designing shorter programs of 2-3 hours, creating a 2-5-day program was a completely unfamiliar territory for me. I felt a mix of nervousness, lack of confidence, uncertainty, and occasional feelings of being stuck and helpless. I observed that many of my colleagues relied on their experience and intuition, making the design process seem somewhat chaotic (at least in my perception). Seeking resources to aid me in this area, I wasn't just looking for discussion structures but also wanted to understand how to craft and deliver a meaningful experience that participants would find relevant and valuable.
How did I cope with this? I just kept looking. I believed that if I persisted in my search, I will eventually arrive at the answers I needed.
And I did! (somewhat!)
Recently, I attended the Power to Train workshop by Advancing SG, and found it insightful.
(I don't frequently write about my experiences, only doing so when particularly inspired by certain workshops I attend. Based on Amelia's 'dipstick,' it seems to be a noteworthy one. I'm excited to share my thoughts with you! XD!)
Power to Train Workshop by Advancing Sg (27-29 Nov 2023)
In accordance with Sun Tzu's wisdom, "Know thyself and know thy enemy," it is crucial to start with an understanding of fundamental principles. Principles, as fundamental truths, serve as guiding lights. While these principles may seem basic, it's essential to reflect on whether we truly comprehend, believe in, and apply them in practice.
Adult Learning Principles
Adults are autonomous and self-directed.
Adults bring knowledge and experience to each learning activity.
Adults are Relevancy Oriented.
Adults are practical about their learning.
Adults are Goal Oriented.
Adults like to be respected.
(adapted from ACLP)
Do we believe that our participants possess the capability for self-directed learning? If so, why do we often find ourselves chasing them for submissions?
Do we trust that our participants can accept responsibilities? When adults are competent, they would naturally want to do it and embrace responsibilities.
Do we hold the notion that there is only one right answer? Facilitators can sometimes affirm specific responses as “Brilliant!” while overlooking others because it’s not the response they were looking for.
Now the world is imperfect, and that’s the reality we need to work with.
Many would resonate with the principles outlined for adult learning.
This leads to the next question: So how do I help Adult learners learn effectively?
To begin, it’s helpful to anchor ourselves in design principles. These principles are adapted from various sources and I have found it helpful from my own experience. Feel free to challenge them if you think it’s not true for you. I welcome your perspectives in the comments.
Learning Design Principles
Curriculum is more meaningful if it is emergent.
A rigorous inquiry method leads to deep learning.
If I am interested in something, I will go deep.
Good questions lead to depth of thinking.
When learners are free to ask questions based on their own curiosity of the world, motivation becomes automatic. Good questions, beyond just looking for the right answers, will lead to a level of depth that varies from person to person but that normally results in greater depth than in prescribed curriculum.
(Sources: School of Thought Victoria - Inquiry Process; Power To Train workshop)
However, people don’t really give themselves permission to engage in inquiry fully, perhaps because we are afraid to make mistakes, or afraid of looking stupid.
The challenge at hand is: How can I develop a design that facilitates deep learning for participants?
The Structured Inquiry Process
In the workshop, I learnt about the Structured Inquiry Process and found it to be a useful model to guide my design. A notable mistake I made was focusing on solely the content I wanted to deliver, and paying less attention to guiding the participants through a process where they could discover answers themselves. The impact is that it can sometimes feel like I’m delivering a lot of content, but learners aren’t hungry so the learning doesn’t stick.
The Structured Inquiry Process lies on a spectrum on the 4 Types of Inquiry:
Here is the example of a Structured Inquiry Process – by a Professor from the Harvard University:
Notice how he poses a question and invites participants to take a stand, challenging their thinking, affirming their efforts (and not the quality of answers). And how he only has 2-3 slides which lands the powerful distinction (to categorical vs consequential reasoning).
The Structured Inquiry approach is based on the Socratic Method. Simply put, asking questions to draw out unexamined assumptions.
“An effective socratic teacher is not only well versed in the subject, and also modest, genuinely curious, affirming of every contribution.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNDYUlxNIAA (short 5mins video on the Socratic Method)
Here’s a couple more reasons why Inquiry based learning is recommended:
Why Inquiry based learning?
It’s how our brain is designed – we learn through inquiry and figuring out the ‘how’
Results in Deep learning (Because it focuses on Concepts and Application than Facts and Skills)
Retention is much higher (compared to traditional education with facts)
Growth in Social-Emotional Learning (promotes self-direction, meta-cognition – understanding one’s own thinking, ability to focus, taking feedback from peers)
Slow, then Fast (takes time and space at the beginning, but after groundwork is laid, learners can then move through content more quickly)
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQoxgYCdgj4 )
So how do I go about designing an inquiry process?
In the lecture by the Harvard Professor, you may have noticed the following. The inquiry process could be broken down to 3 main parts:
Part 1: Inspire, Tap on Active prior knowledge, Highlight Relevance
Part 2: Inquire, Active Learning, Highlight relevance (where we facilitate), avoid given them the answers; challenge here is to ask good questions that bring learners to bring them to the edge of their understanding
Part 3: Reflect, Cement Understanding, Share and discuss – Introduce the distinction here
There are many other processes, such as ORID, Circle of Viewpoint, Compass Points. The MOE uses the model called ‘Clarifying, Sensitizing, Influence’:
So, the next time you design something, ask yourself: What’s the Inquiry Process?
Essentially, try not to tell learners something they can figure out on their own, allow them to do the ‘work’.
My next biggest challenge is that sometimes I’m not sure where exactly I want participants to land. Yen Kai brought up the concept of distinctions and explained that this is dependent on our content mastery.
Distinctions provide a new way of seeing the normal. They are short and sharp, and when it lands, you feel a sense of release and ‘aha’ moment in the room because it speaks to reality. What is the nuance / lens that people are not aware of?
Four examples to illustrate the concept of Distinctions:
1. What is the distinction between Advice and Feedback?
I could be following the SBI feedback model and still give you an advice!
It depends on your willingness to hear ‘no’. Feedback is something we can choose to accept or reject. With that understanding, are we ok when people reject our feedback? When we’re unwilling to hear ‘no’, it means we are giving advice (i.e. I know better!).
2. What is the distinction between Complaint and Feedback?
Similarly, I could also use the SBI model to complain!
Complain is about me, Feedback is about you.
When I complain, it’s about my dissatisfaction towards something. When I give feedback, it is in service of you and your growth.
3. What is the distinction between Blame and Complain?
(I used ChatGPT and got a pretty decent response! There is no fixed answer for distinctions, it’s really through reflection and reading, practicing and trying out the ‘grand theory’ on people and seeing if it lands for majority of the group.)
Last One – I picked this up from Jasmine, I found it quite profound, made sense for me too.
4. What is the distinction between nice and kind?
We often hear ‘Being clear is kind’. But I could be clear and nice too?
The difference is how much you care. I can be nice and say things that you want to hear because I don’t care that much for you. Or I could be kind and say the hard truths, and that’s because I care for you.
I am not sure if this article left you with more questions than answers – because that’s how I felt when the training ended! Here are some questions I am sitting with:
How do I come up with a design that allows for participants to engage in deep learning? What is the inquiry process? How might I design questions to lead participants to deeper thinking, and achieve programme intent? What are the distinction(s) that I want participants to walk away with?
The biggest question: How do we even arrive at Distinctions?
I asked the two trainers, Yen Kai and Jasmine, and their answers are similar. You read, reflect on your own experiences, test it out on participants. When there is a push back, it means the distinction is not sharp enough, and that’s the opportunity for us to refine our distinctions.
// PS. Distinctions also remind me of the Abstract Conceputalisation or ‘grand theorizing’ in the Four Roles of a Gestalt Intervener (Mary Ann Rainey).
It feels like both of them go by experience and intuition! And this made me more curious:
Even if it’s by intuition, there would be a thought process that one goes through to arrive at a distinction.
If there is such process, what would it look like?
What makes it challenging? I think partly, it’s the emotional process of staying with the uncertainty that there is no right answer, being present to my experience and the experience of others so I can sense what is most true for us. This also looks like an Open Inquiry process because there is no straightforward answers.
What would make it easier?
I turned to the teacher, youtube, and found this video which offered a unique perspective and way of thinking.
BEFORE YOU WATCH IT:
Pause and ask yourself, as a facilitator, amongst thousands of frameworks and pieces of content, how do you determine what is most relevant for the participants? Do you comb through lots of content first then try to distill what’s most important? I do this a lot and I find it very time consuming and overwhelming at times. :(
Here’s the summary. Before we dive into learning content, Justin Sung suggests:
1.Think about how you want to apply the information first.
What types of problems or experiences do I need to answer? That I don’t feel equipped to answer? Am I sure I can’t tackle?
How can I use what I know to solve this?
2. Be clear about the problem and how you are trying to solve it.
What are the components to the problem?
What are the variations of the problem?
3. Think about your own hypothesis, how do you think the solution might look?
4. Create the process of discovery and set up basic logic and reasoning to begin with.
5. Test your your hypothesis (or distinction) which you can either accept or reject it and Iterate.
Here’s how you can immediately apply it in your life. The night before you go to work:
Think about the problems you might face the next day
How might you solve those problems the next day? This would only take 10-30mins.
Check: Were these truly the problems that I faced?
Solve the problem they way you hypothesized. Did it work? Did it not work?
Consolidate your learning.
Now you’ve had the experience – you can think of even more specific questions to ask yourself and issues. When we are at work, we are constantly ‘bombarded’ by different experiences and we can turn experiences into active learning opportunities. This is a cycle of learning that is based around creation and identification of problems.
Currently, i’m in the process of testing this approach and I may write a subsequent blogpost on my discovery and reflections. :)
I hope you enjoyed this article as much I enjoyed writing it. (I’m quite amazed how much I can create when I’m hit by a spur of inspiration!) I spend a few hours writing this last night after I finished the training, and consolidated by thoughts this morning. I would love to hear your perspectives – feel free to reach out and connect with me here!