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HIGH-IMPACT LEARNING
Using the Seven Ways of Learning to Get Results

IN CERTAIN RESPECTS MANAGING IS LIKE COOKING: you need to select the best ingredients and mix them together in just the right amounts. Effective managers are good at selecting and mixing; they know how to identify and use the right resources to get results. As the manager of your own learning, you now have the ingredients you need. You are aware of seven different ways of learning and you know how to be an effective participant within the environment of each way.

The next step is to learn how to manage all the resources at your disposal to get the best results. As you read this chapter you will learn how to select appropriate ways of learning, how to use them, and how to assess results.

CHOICE OR NO CHOICE
Getting the Most Out of Learning

When we place the seven ways of learning side by side, as we have done in these chapters, the natural tendency is to ask: Which theory is right? Which way of learning is best? If we have learned anything together as the writers and readers of this book, it is that learning is a many-sided activity and there is no one “best way.” The best way is the way that is most likely to bring about the results you want.

If you have a choice, you always want to select the way of learning that fits your desired learning outcomes. If your goal is to learn new skills, you need behavioral learning; if you want to understand and remember information, you need cognitive learning, and so forth. As obvious as this appears, people often make wrong choices for bad reasons.

There is a natural tendency to choose the way of learning you like most. That natural tendency has been reinforced recently by the popular interest in learning styles. For example, if you are an extrovert and you prefer learning in groups, it is natural that you would gravitate toward collaborative learning. It is natural to want to stay within your comfort zone. But if the learning you need and desire involves learning new skills, you will develop those skills most effectively and efficiently through behavioral learning, not through learning in groups. If you need to practice your performance, you need to learn through virtual realities, not through groups. A pilot will never learn to fly an airplane through learning in groups, however much he or she may prefer collaborative learning. On the other hand, passengers might learn to overcome their fear of flying through collaborative learning in groups. As the punishment fits the crime, so the appropriate way of learning should fit the desired outcome.

Can more than one way of learning be used? Yes and no. Different ways of learning can be used one after the other, and often are. In some classes or workshops several ways of learning might be used over one or two hours. You should be able to recognize different ways of learning and adapt quickly now. On the other hand, you cannot use two or more ways of learning to achieve the same outcome. Different ways of learning achieve different outcomes.

An important challenge in managing your own learning is to choose and use the right way of learning for the right outcomes.

Sometimes you will have a choice about what to learn and how to learn it. If you have a choice, make a good match. If you have little or no choice and you find yourself assigned to a particular learning experience, your challenge is still to maximize your learning. The assigned experience may work out superbly for you and may prove to be just what you need, or you may dislike it intensely. In fact, you may dislike that way of learning and the way it is being carried out so much that you need to put forth high levels of effort in order to maximize the learning you can derive from that situation. Either way, selected or assigned, liking the experience or not, you have some degree of control over the situation.

You may also encounter situations that appear to be confusing or disorganized. When you have had good learning experiences you are not likely to be satisfied with less. In a sense, then, learning about learning is training for revolutionaries. Once you know how learning works—what the facilitator should be promoting and what you and the other participants should be doing—you will not find it easy to be a passive observer of a less-than-optimal experience. Now that you know about each way of learning, you also know how to improve the experience for yourself and others. You might protest, “It is not my responsibility to improve the learning experience; that’s the facilitator’s job.” You may be right, but it is your role to get the most out of any learning experience even if that means helping to make the situation better. Many learning experiences could be improved dramatically by participants who have the knowledge and courage to improve them.

You can maximize your learning by making good choices about the way of learning or, when you have no choice, getting the most out of a situation that may be less than optimal. The focus is always on results.

LEARNING THAT STICKS
Intensity, Frequency, Duration

A lot of learning doesn’t stick. You were there, you experienced the training, you sat through a class or workshop, you were exposed, but when it comes to recall, application, or real change of behavior or attitude, there is little impact. No results. Why is that?

Learning is like medicine; you have to follow the prescription carefully for best results. A man went to his doctor—so the story goes—and asked if there was any truth to the suggestion that stewed prunes will relieve constipation. The doctor replied in the affirmative. The man then asked the doctor how many prunes to eat. With a sly smile the doctor asked, “What kind of results do you want to get?” In prescribing medicine, physicians are accustomed to using three guidelines: intensity, frequency, and duration. Intensity refers to the level of dosage—the number of milligrams of the particular pill. Frequency refers to how often the pills are taken, for example, three times a day. Duration refers to the length of time of the course of administration, for example, one month. These terms—intensity, frequency, duration—are useful for thinking about how to maximize your learning.

There is a tendency, particularly in training programs where time away from the job and cost factors are important, to cut corners. Likewise, when we are pursuing our own learning independently there is a temptation to put in minimal time and effort because we face so many other demands on our time and energy. The problem with false economies is that they usually compromise results.

Intensity has to do with how well the way of learning is employed. If the experience is well designed and enthusiastically facilitated, and if you can clearly identify the way of learning and the theory behind it, the experience will probably have a high level of intensity. Each way of learning has its own internal ground rules for maximizing the intensity of the experience. Intensity grows out of the dynamic that occurs between facilitator and participant and among participants when everything is working as it should for that way of learning.

Frequency refers to how much time is allotted for each way of learning, how much the learning is practiced, and how many occasions might be necessary for real learning to occur. It is unlikely, for example, that you will learn much about problem solving from solving one problem, or a new skill with one try. Unfortunately, one-minute learning doesn’t exist. Repeated exposure is often necessary.

Duration refers to how often the learning takes place over an extended period of time, how many times the learning can be revisited, and whether a sequence of learnings can be built one upon the other. Most learning takes time to process and absorb, so some types of learning may need to extend over several weeks or months to achieve high impact.

The seven ways of learning offer no miracle cures and there is nothing magical about their use. They need to be engaged in rigorously, often enough, and over a long enough period of time to bring about desired results. Learning sticks when it is engaged in with appropriate intensity, frequency, and duration.

SELF-ASSESSMENT
Knowing What You Learned

Most of us learned to hate tests in school. Tests, we believed, were given to find out what we didn’t know. Even a perfect paper sometimes came back marked “minus zero.” The whole arrangement provokes embarrassment—someone who supposedly knows a lot, testing someone who hardly knows anything—so it is not surprising that we would rather not know what we learned than to have to take a test.

Knowing what you learned, however, is another important factor in managing your own learning. Is there some way to assess what you learn without always having to take a test? Sometimes tests are necessary, but we prefer to use the term assessment to get beyond the old ideas of testing and evaluation. We also prefer with adult learners to put the responsibility for finding out about what was learned into the hands of the learner. Self-assessment is simply knowing how well you learned. Self-assessment breaks up that treacherous game of trying to fool someone about what you don’t know. The alternative to self-assessment is self-deception.

Sometimes the facilitators of the learning experience in which you are engaged may be conducting assessments. They may be following a familiar four-step model (Kirkpatrick, 1996)¹ where they want to know if you were satisfied with the learning, if actual learning took place, how much your behavior changed, and whether there were results for the organization. This is important information for trainers to gather, and you should cooperate with their efforts, but the goal of self-assessment is to provide the information you want about your own learning. The assessment you conduct can be formal or informal, it can draw on information you gather or the facilitator gathers, and it can be planned ahead of time or improvised later. In any case, you need to set up some arrangements for self-assessment for these three important reasons.

1. You definitely need to know what you learned and how well you learned it. These are your results. They tell you whether you need to try again or whether you are ready for additional learning.

2. Assessment often provides feedback that is essential for the learning process itself. For some ways of learning, feedback is actually a part of the learning process.

3. Most people learn more if they know that someone is checking. You are the one to check, of course, so you are playing a little game with yourself, but it’s an honest game and you won’t want to disappoint yourself.

The assessment strategies you design for yourself should be tailored specifically to each of the ways of learning. We can provide suggestions to get you started, but you should be inventive in designing assessment that fits the subject matter, the strategy, and your need for feedback.

1. Learning new skills. This way of learning is useful for building skills, so the assessment is really quite simple: Can you perform the skill? If the learning outcome is observable behavior, as it usually is in this case, then you need to observe your performance or work with someone who can give you that feedback. Behavioral learning usually involves steps, so if you can’t perform the entire skill, perhaps you can assess which parts of the skill you do well and where you may be having trouble. Remember that knowledge of results in the behavioral way of learning also serves as reinforcement. Assessment at each step of the way provides needed reinforcement as well as information about how to proceed.

2. Learning from presentations. This way of learning is valuable for understanding and remembering information from explanations and other forms of presentation. Because understanding and remembering are internal mental processes, as opposed to observable behaviors, assessments usually need to be written or oral so that you have a chance to demonstrate to yourself or someone else what you understand and remember. Many written materials provide study guides, questions for review, or an alternate form of a test. Where there is no examination, make up a test of essentials and take it. If specific terminology must be remembered, develop memory devices and check how well they work. If it is a process, write a narrative of it from memory and then check it against your notes. If it is a product or service procedure, write a description or draw a diagram of it. You may prefer to tell someone what you have learned and then check on what you included or omitted. In any case, design an assessment that takes you beyond mental rehearsal and demonstrates openly, on paper or orally, that you understand and remember the essential information.

3. Learning to think. This way of learning helps to develop critical, creative, and dialogical thinking. Assessment will usually involve developing a written or oral critique of someone else’s thinking or a report or proposal that represents your own thinking. An appropriate assessment might include an analysis of the way the argument is being made, the evidence, the assumptions, and the fallacies. Assessments for creativity examine whether the ideas or products you or others have produced are new and appropriate. Dialogical thinking can be assessed by asking yourself to compare and contrast differing arguments, to generate counter-arguments, or to take an unfamiliar or uncomfortable position and defend it.

4. Learning to solve problems and make decisions. This way of learning calls on you to demonstrate the ability to use mental models in solving problems and in making decisions that project outcomes as probabilities. The assessment requires practice with problems and decisions, either through prepared cases or the real problems and decisions that come up in the organization. These can be used to generate hypothetical problems and decision points to see how well you employ appropriate mental models. In this assessment you are interested especially in the processes you are using to arrive at solutions and decisions; that is, how your responses are being framed and the methods you are using to arrive at your conclusions. You may want to treat a situation that you face as a case, and conduct a formal case analysis or set up a formal decision model.

5. Learning in groups. This way of learning is useful for exploring opinions, attitudes, and beliefs, and for building collaboration skills. If a videotape of your training is available you can watch it, alone or with a mentor, to see what you notice about your participation. Self-assessment can focus on changes that may have occurred internally for you—a new awareness of something in yourself or others, a changed attitude, or a modified belief. You may notice new communication or collaboration skills that you are bringing to your workplace group or team. You can ask colleagues if they notice any changes in you, and you can monitor your own group participation carefully. In general, the learning outcomes from groups and teams may be less tangible than from other ways of learning, so it may be especially important to ask yourself if you can put into words what you learned.

6. Learning to perform. This way of learning enables you to practice tasks that might otherwise have high risk in real life. The assessment involves seeing how close you can come to the desired live performance. Unlike other forms of assessment where it is necessary to step back and do some additional activity to see if learning occurred, in this instance the learning is demonstrated in the performing. The role plays, dramatic scenarios, and simulations are the assessment. Presumably practice makes perfect, so the key to assessment here is in gaining feedback from the facilitator and the other participants about your performance. What you hope to uncover are the strengths and weaknesses in your performance, and the critical points at which improvements could be made.

7. Learning from experience. This way of learning uses all of the senses and the multitrack processing capabilities of the brain to pull learning out of experience. The assessment should address the question: What did you learn from this particular experience? Because this way of learning is enhanced through reflection, the various types of mechanisms you use—talking with a mentor, writing about your experience, or presenting your experience to others—are all rich in opportunities for self-assessment. Your efforts to make meaning of your experience are the assessment.

Efforts to assess your learning should be driven by the way of learning itself. Avoid inappropriate assessment methods—for example, testing factual recall to see what was learned from a group process, or testing problem-solving ability when the goal was only to understand and remember the information. Make sure that the assessment fits the learning, is representative of the total range of things learned, is of the right level of difficulty, and produces results that are actually useful to you in some important way.

Managing your own learning also involves taking charge of the overall arrangements for learning. This includes, when you have a choice, selecting the right way of learning for getting desired results. When you have no choice, it means finding ways to maximize your learning anyway. It also includes managing the intensity, frequency, and duration of the experience for high impact, and assessing carefully what learning has taken place. Like a good cook, you will select the right ingredients for learning, use them in proper amounts, mix them expertly, and check frequently for taste.