Recharging

Every night, I plug in all of my electronic contraptions so that they can be freshly charged and ready to go for the undoubtedly busy day ahead. I only wish charging my own batteries was that simple.

Having just spent a few days with a huge group of enthusiastic, energetic, dedicated, and forward-thinking speakers and conference attendees at Elliot Masie’s Learning 2011 conference, I rediscovered the secret to recharging my batteries. Unlike our electronic devices, which seem to thrive quietly in the dark just taking in the energy needed to be powered up for the day ahead, we need people to provide that electric spark that allows us to kick it into high gear.

In an age when we are almost constantly connected to one another through social media, texting, and e-mail, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we are surrounded by people who are giving us the energy to recharge. Not so. Deep conversations are the true energy source – we are powered up by  face-to-face, real-time, extended discussions and debates with people who share our passions.

More than one speaker over the course of the conference emphasized the need to put our electronic devices aside and engage more deeply with one another. And while I learned quite a bit from listening to speakers share their stories, and taking long walks around the lake to think about the ideas I was gathering – it was the breakfast discussion, the after-session follow-up, and the late night conversation in the Market that deeply resonated and made things fall into place. I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned and to talk with colleagues who can help me shape the ideas into projects and outcomes.

Here’s one of the things I’ve learned.  I don’t need more electronic connections in my life as much as I need a recommitment to real conversation. I too often eat lunch at my desk and hesitate to ask for time to bounce ideas around with others. I don’t reach out often enough to those people who I know are working on similar projects. There are lots of people a lot closer to home who share my excitement about learning and development, so I don’t need to come all the way to Florida to recharge my batteries. Although…. I think I’ll come back next year!

“Feeling connected to others is what gives our lives meaning and fuels our sense of belonging. A sense of connection can come from a shared passion, a shared experience or history, a shared goal or mission. It speaks to our desire to identify with and feel part of something bigger than ourselves.
                                                     ~ Betsy Myers, from Take the Lead

Let me add a quick shout-out to everyone at The Masie Center who organized such a diverse and high-energy conference, and to all the speakers and colleagues who made the sessions so thought-provoking and enriching. Learning and development really is an exciting and worthy line of work, and I’m thrilled to have engaged with some of the best in the business over the last few days.

A learning environment’s ideal state

I’ve been creating some documentation on learning environment design for a workshop I’m doing in a couple of weeks at Learning 2011. Today, I was noodling over the criteria for a rich learning environment. Whether you are designing an environment for other learners, or paying attention to enriching your own learning environment, here are some test points to determine if it’s a thing of beauty.

In my framework, a learning environment is an aggregation of various learning components that is designed to support learners in self-provisioning materials, gaining access to people, and engaging in activities that are needed in order to learn in a specific arena.

Features of a rich learning environment

> To support high-impact learning outcomes, a rich learning environment promotes motivation to learn, contains high quality learning resources, and provides opportunity for application and feedback. There are a lot of features packed into this one bullet, but these relate to what we call the “learning equation” at work – we belive that learning impact is a product of those factors. If any of those factors are weak, than learning will be severely limited.

That first item – promoting motivation to learn – is the trickiest to achieve, I think. For the most part, motivation comes from within the learner, not from some activity in the learning environment. Still, an environment that is active, leading edge, and easy to engage may indeed spark excitement about learning.

> By definition, a comprehensive learning environment contains components in each of the major categories: resources and tools, relationships and networks, formal training and education, work-based programs and practices, and in-the-job action and reflection.

Each of these categories brings a different needed aspect of a robust environment. Resources and tools are useful for just-in-time learning; relationships and networks inject new thinking and provide a sounding board for new ideas; formal training provides the frameworks around which to organize thinking, work-based programs are often critical for feedback purposes; and in-the-job action and reflection is at the core of learning.

> A rich learning environment contains components most appropriate for the level of experience of the learner audience. Novices need access to documentation and structured skill-building resources as well as coaching and feedback. The more tenured and expert learners become, the more they need informal, personalized, and on-the-job learning.

When we design a learning environment, then, we should concentrate our energies on the kinds of resources needed by the type of learners we are trying to support. That’s why it is so important to define our learner group up front – otherwise, when we will have a difficult time prioritizing and making choices around what will be included and developed. A combination of learner group with widely varying levels of experience and a topic area that is too broad will make designing a learning environment a near impossible task.

> I think Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson are on to something with their conceptualization of the five moments of need related to performance support – and I would say that a robust learning environment has learning resources for all of the five moments of need. The moments when you need to turn to something in your learning environment are: 1) learning for the first time, 2) learning more, 3) applying what you have learned, 4) when something changes, and 5) when something goes wrong.

Checking whether you have learning components to address all of the five moments of need is another way of ensuring variety and depth in your learning environment.

On the mark?

These are the learning environment quality criteria I’ve come up with so far. The more of these features you are able to achieve, the more likely it is that your environment will meet the needs of your learners – no matter how widely varying those needs are within the context of the topic of the learning environment.

I would enjoy hearing comments – they will help me to fine-tune my discussion with folks at Learning 2011.

You are what you eat

I just finished reading an interesting book, The Accidental Creative, by Todd Henry. The book provides advice on maintaining creative energy for those of us who need to think and create every day in our jobs. A lot of the advice resonates with me, but at the top of the list is the idea that to maintain creative energy, we really need to stimulate our creative minds. Henry says:

“You need to be purposeful about including self-directed, thought-provoking and capacity-increasing stimuli into your life on a consistent basis. Whether it’s in the form of print media, movies, web videos, conversations, advertisements, or anything else that is delivering a message you must process and assimilate, the stimuli you take in over the course of your day informs the quality of the insights you generate. Just like good food increases your capacity to be active and healthy, the higher the quality of your stimuli, the better you are setting yourself up for high-level breakthroughs.”

To reiterate: the stimuli you take in over the course of your day informs the quality of the insights you generate. In other words, as the old saying goes, “you are what you eat.”

That got me wondering whether I am doing enough to regularly stimulate my creative energy.

My perspective on the need for creative stimulus has been sharpened by some recent experiences. When facilitating a collaborative inquiry process in a recent course, a colleague had recommended some articles by John Heron and Peter Reason, who talk about four ways of knowing. Without getting into the deep details (although I recommend the articles cited below), it is important to note that one of the ways of knowing is “presentational” – which is knowing through metaphor and story as well as through images and movement (knowing expressed in nonverbal and artistically creative ways). Too often, we gloss over presentational knowing in favor of what we experience and what we know intellectually and what we do, effectively shutting out an important part of how we interpret our world.

For those of us who need to be creative on a regular basis, highlighting that more expressive mode of knowing can be important. In a recent Positive Professional Development workshop with Michele Martin, we used images instead of words to try to capture our professional contributions and goals. I admit to having been skeptical of this process, but in the end, the images served to bring to the surface some more deeply held thoughts and feelings. The act of verbalizing (or telling stories about) the images – explaining why the images resonated – brought forward language and metaphor that proved to be very useful for deciding on actions.

Which brings me back to thinking about how to more effectively and deliberately provide stimulation for my creative side – to find ways to access presentational knowing as I do the work of designing, strategizing, and facilitating every day.

I am a voracious reader – fiction, fantasy, memoir, and bookshelves of non-fiction on the professional topics that interest me. I tap into the theory and research community in our field by reading a variety of academic journals and research web sites. I also regularly review blogs and twitter feeds from some thinkers whose work resonates with me (and some whose work challenges me). Conferences are always a great source of stimulation as well, and I am looking forward to Learning 2011 coming up in a few weeks. 

But all of that is intellectual stimulation… I want to find ways to tap into that more creative, artistic mode of seeing the world, and use that perspective to inform and shape my work as well. I admit I’m not quite sure how to do that… Geek that I am, I am going off to the library later today to pick up some books on creativity exercises to see if they will give me some clues. (How ironic! Perhaps I should go to the art museum instead.)

I would be happy to hear advice from you on how you tap into your “presentational knowing” – your more creative, artistic side – in order to energize the intellectual work you do every day.

 

For more on presentational knowing, see:

John Heron and Peter Reason (2008). Extending epistemology within a co-operative inquiry. In Handbook of Action Research, 2nd edition. Edited by P. Reason and H. Bradbury. Sage Publications

John Heron and Peter Reason (1997). A participatory inquiry paradigm. In Qualitative Inquiry 3(3), Sage Publications

Identity and learning

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about the deep connection between learning and identify formation, and the implications for the work that I do every day.

These ruminations were begun when I read Herminia Ibarra’s book, Working Identity.  At its core, the book provides an unconventional view of the process of career transition. Through the stories of real people making career changes and a sophisticated analysis of the messy processes they went through, Ibarra sharpens our understanding of the process of career transition and illustrates it as a process of identity formation. I highly recommend the book, and would point you to posts that Michele Martin has written summarizing some of the key ideas.  (See Working Identity and Questions to Compose Your Working Identity.)

In this post, I want to reflect on the underlying theme that struck me as quite profound – the idea that what we do with our working lives is a part of who we are. That sounds obvious and uninteresting until you think about it for a while.

We who are in the business of helping people learn in the context of their jobs or their professional pursuits are in the business of identity formation. Our work might be as important as parenting in terms of the potential influence on others’ lives. That is a humbling thought.

“Who comes into a person’s life may be the single greatest factor of influence to what that life becomes.”   ~ Robert Kegan

Environmental influences on learning and identity

The connection between learning and identity is not a new idea. The community of practice literature especially focuses on the idea that learning is a process of learning to be. As we take on various roles in our lives, and become part of many different communities, they all influence who we are in that context. We don’t simply learn how to play, we learn how to be a child. We don’t simply learn math and geography, we learn to be a student. We don’t just learn to process claims or manage people, we learn to be  an individual contributor or a leader.

In this process of learning knowledge bases and skill sets in order to be effective in the various roles we play, outside environments  - the people who surround us – exert influence on our learning. Others “teach” us lessons through how they respond to our actions. Others identify what we “should” learn in order to behave appropriately in a given situation – they influence who we become. As a learning leader, I am one of those others.

This reminds me that when I work to create a learning environment for people in specific roles, I am not just helping them to learn innocuous facts and actions. That learning environment is part of what forms their identity as professional practitioners. What messages am I sending through that environment? What kind of professional am I hoping to develop? What character traits am I nurturing?

It seems important that we think about this more deliberately even though we cannot and should not take full credit for who our learners become.

Identity’s influence on learning

Identity works on learning from the inside out as well. How we see ourselves causes us to seek out certain kinds of learning and to reject others. Recent writings regarding a “new culture of learning” point out that people who are passionate about their work find learning opportunities abounding in chance interactions, internet connections, and day-to-day work.

When I consider creating learning environment to support advanced learning for a specific audience group in my organization, the first question I need to ask is about learner motivation. If learners see themselves as professionals, if they have a self-image that includes being highly skilled in their work, then they will naturally take advantage of the learning environment we might pull together. But if they do not seem to have that innate desire to learn and grow in the same way that the organization needs them to learn and grow, we have a different issue altogether. And a well-organized learning environment won’t help that issue.

Food for thought

In the learning and development field, we often get caught up in tactical goals and objectives; we see our work and our programs as instrumental to helping people do their jobs and helping our organizations to achieve their goals. To supply the motivation to learn in a work context, we rely on learners seeing themselves as skilled professionals and desiring to do a good job to supply the motivation to learn in a work context. It is useful – and profoundly humbling – to recognize that when we impact others’ learning, we are acting on their very identities. It’s something I’ll be continuing to ruminate.

Learning from experience

Few ideas are as sacrosanct in contemporary sensibilities as the notion that human beings achieve mastery over their lives through learning from experience.  ~ James March

I’ve been doing some work recently related to the Learning Environment Design framework, and a few interesting bits of feedback have given me some food for thought related to on-the-job learning. A colleague who reviewed a paper I wrote on the component framework noted that the category of in-the-job action and reflection had few specifics compared to the other categories of learning components, which seemed the wrong proportion given the importance of learning from experience. In the same week, a focus group that I ran identified few instances of learning by doing when asked to talk about the ways they learned their specialty skills. When pressed, these folks noted that when they learned at the moment of need – in the work – they often relied on resources in the other categories of components, especially seeking out people who could help and finding accessible resources to inform the problem.

These “mmm…” moments have me thinking about the complexity of learning from experience and how to leverage that in our learning environments, whether these are our personal environments or the environments that we are designing to support others’ learning.

 

It’s not so simple.

In The Ambiguities of Experience, James March writes eloquently about the fact that learning from experience is quite complicated and too often not actually helpful.

Take the idea that we learn by replicating successes – that sounds innocuous enough, but consider the possibilities for error in the process. When something works, and we want to take lessons from that success forward into future action, we try to identify the characteristics of the action that drove its success. This is because we rarely need to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same context, so we are replicating the success in a slightly different environment. For this to work, we have to have identified the “right” lessons to take forward, and we have to have fully understood the “causes” of the success – a tall order.

 

So how do we support learning from experience?

In adding the in-the-job action and reflection category to the learning environment component framework, my intention was to recognize that learning from experience plays a substantial role in our learning of any complex skill.

I noted four components: At it’s most basic level, the category involves  learning by doing. Or we might use experimentation by more carefully deciding on an action and thoughtfully noting the results with the intention of learning from that cycle. It is also important to note that learning occurs through co-creation in collaboration with others. It was clear to me that reflection needed to be called out as one of the components as well – the need for reflection is a clear theme in theory and research on adult learning. I spelled out reflection as “self-monitoring and analysis of outcomes and feedback.” Those four components seemed at the time to capture the basics.

And these components have proven useful in assessing and designing learning environments. In assessing the current state of a learning environment, examining how effectively people are learning in the course of doing the job is no easy task, but a critical one. In designing an environment, I have wanted to consider how to make room for effectively learning from experience. Can we help people to see how they can leverage their day-to-day work for learning? Can we make room for and encourage solid reflection? Can we team people up – especially on new problems – in ways that will help them to learn from and with one another?

Even so, I can’t help but wonder if this line of thinking is oversimplified. Even if I hone in on the learning from experience that is engaged for the purpose of building work skills (and leave aside learning from experience for other purposes like identity formation, for example), I wonder if there’s a lot more to be examined.

I want to continue looking at this important aspect of learning to provide solid advice on enriching this part of a learning environment. If you have ideas about other aspects of learning from experience in a work context that should be considered, I would be happy to hear them.

Digital textbooks – A new design challenge

I’ve been doing some research on digital textbooks in order to prepare a faculty development workshop on the topic. I’m impressed, and truly optimistic regarding what is available and what is possible. Pretty cool stuff!

The way I see it, even if all we do is produce beautiful textbooks that can be read on a digital reader and electronically marked with highlights and notes – that would be terrific. Books would be easier to carry around and access on the fly.  As well, there are cost advantages, and the digital format is a “greener” way to publish. All good – but I’ve seen so much more than just a change in format.

Several producers are working hard to enrich the textbook experience by providing extra content (rollover definitions, longer graphics captions) and links to relevant video, audio, and reference materials. Some sites allow for sharing comments and highlights with a study group as well, giving students another way to engage with each other in coming to an understanding of the material. The capability has the potential to be overwhelming, but some of the examples I have reviewed so far were quite well done. (For example, take a look at what they’re doing at Inkling – if you have an iPad, you can download sample chapters.)

Some people worry that all those links and other bells and whistles are just distractions that prevent our minds from concentrating on the ideas being presented in the text. Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows), for example, makes a pretty impassioned argument that those hyperlinks interrupt our thought processes even if we ignore them. I absolutely agree that we need to be thoughtful about the choices we make in enriching the content.

But recognizing the fact that learners don’t come to the material with the same background and interests, it would seem to be a terrific idea to give options for review or deeper study - and in digital format, these options are available with one click rather than looking up the back page of the syllabus, and then using a search engine (or trekking to the library!) to find what you’re looking for. Removing the barriers to further exploration of a topic is a huge win.

To make this new approach to publishing as powerful as possible, we’ll have to apply some solid design thinking to the production of textbooks – and other kinds of books for that matter. The links we provide need to support learning, and expand the material at different levels and in relevant ways. We’ll want to consider producing customized materials, and we may need to get appropriate permissions to link to publicly available resources.

One of the exercises I plan to give to the faculty in this class is to design the digital presentation of a favorite chapter or resource – identifying what they might hyperlink that would support their students in positive ways. Imagine what we can do!

I’m still doing a lot of exploration and thinking about implications here – I would welcome any comments you have or references you would share on the topic.

The path forward

“Our key career management strategies are knowing our strengths, following our passions and seeing the opportunities in ongoing change. Our career goal is to keep finding the intersection between who we are, what we love, and the experiences we encounter along the way. This is both insanely easy and amazingly hard.”
                                                                     ~ Michele Martin

I count myself one of those lucky people that is very passionate about my work.  There are three arenas in which I really get into the “flow” – developing and deepening the professional skills of colleagues and students who work in learning and development roles, promoting the application of theory and research in our practice, and championing workplace learning and the creation of comprehensive learning strategies to support knowledge and skill development. Those are big, bold things and I get excited thinking about my work in each of these areas.

These are the topics I want to focus on here. This is my space for thinking out loud, sharing ideas in progress, and taking a stand – and it’s where I can gather input and reaction from people around the world who share these passions. So today, I’m relaunching this blog and rededicating myself to regular posts. Some of you may notice a whole new look, and a new organizational scheme based on categories (although I’m still working on categorizing the old posts).

This rededication is born out of several months of introspection. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about my personal and professional goals and the path forward to achieving them. I’ve been working on identifying my strengths, clarifying what I want to contribute professionally, and finding my passion.

For their advice, I am eternally indebted to Marcus Buckingham (Go Put Your Strengths to Work), John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison (The Power of Pull). I don’t know these folks, but the ideas they have published through various sources have been challenging and centering. I’ve been working through strengths exercises with colleagues at work, and I’ve found these conversations have really helped me clarify my passions. (Thank you all!)

Most importantly, I am indebted to Michele Martin, consultant and author of The Bamboo Project Blog, whose recent series of posts and ”day camps” on positive professional development provided a profound list of questions to ponder on the journey. I do know Michele, and I appreciate how she has shared her own career jouney and the ideas that brought her clarity and inspiration. Many, many thanks, Michele!

I hope you’ll join me in virtual conversation on this path forward.

The New Culture of Learning

I’m a huge fan of John Seely Brown’s work, and I read The Power of Pull last year and his newest collaboration, A New Culture of Learning, in the last week or so.  The vision that the authors create in these works is truly inspirational – a world where passion drives individual learning and connectivity makes collaboration with like-minded others just a few clicks away.

As a learner, the new culture of learning encourages me to think more broadly about how I learn and what I might do to accelerate and enrich my own approaches to learning. As a learning leader, I want to be able to promote and support the new culture of learning by providing as many tools as possible and helping learners to see the myriad of ways they can learn and grow through their own efforts and through collaboration with their peers.

But I also quietly doubt that the “old” culture of learning has outlived its usefulness and that connectivity and collaboration will be the primary way we learn everything that we need to learn.

The argument put forward in The Power of Pull and A New Culture of Learning is that the world is changing too quickly for us to even attempt to reify and “transfer” learning to newcomers. But I think there are content areas and skills that can be learned in structured ways to brings newcomers on board even in the most complex and fast-changing professions. When I enter a space that requires new knowledge and skill, I’m careful not to annoy the people who live in that space with my newcomer questions – I seek more formal means to come up to speed before jumping in. I appreciate when others do the same in those spaces where I am an expert, and I’m happy to create formal entre points (dare I say training and eduction?) or recommend resources to assist them as well. Once we come up to speed on some baseline, participation and collaboration is absolutely the way we develop into experts, but I think structured learning and participation are still often the best way to start out. Does that ring true for anyone else?

Seely Brown and his co-authors also celebrate the idea that memorization of facts is no longer necessary in general education if we can instead provide students with the tools to access and explore information on the internet. But I think that our ability to make connections, to cross boundaries, to innovate depends on holding ideas in our heads – and some of that information comes from more traditional, structured learning. I have found my broad liberal arts education provides me with metaphors and concepts that I use all the time, and I’m betting I wouldn’t have those ideas in my head without the requirements of a formal education.

In addition, it has been my experience that many people struggle with accessing and using new tools for learning, despite their relative expertise in operating a computer and surfing the net. Identifying like-minded peers with whom to collaborate doesn’t necessarily come naturally. Resources aren’t marked with a seal of approval and determining credibility and accuracy takes a little bit of digging and a lot of good judgement. Because so many professionals and leading edge thinkers have been able to tap into the collective, they can make it sound easy – but it isn’t always, and everyone isn’t comfortable jumping in with both feet. In addition to getting everyone access to people and to information, we probably need to help people learn how to learn – and that is as true of grade-schoolers as it is of out-of-school people who are just now learning to take advantage of the net.

This is important because we still need to develop and apply expertise in the “old” culture of learning. We still need creative and skilled instructional designers and developers, engaging and talented learning facilitators, and great coaches and mentors. We need writers, graphic artists, and videographers who know how to support learning.

Those of us who work in the learning and development field shouldn’t be looking for new careers; we should be redoubling our efforts to learn how to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in creating formal training and education (especially in schools at all levels). And we should be learning as much as possible about how to take advantage of this new culture of learning – for ourselves, and for the learners we support.

I’m thinking that the new culture of learning doesn’t replace the old, it enriches it.

For more on the new culture of learning, I highly recommend:
The Power of Pull, by John Hugel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison (2010)
A New Culture of Learning, by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011)

Collaborative Learning

In corporate learning and development circles, we’ve been talking quite a bit lately about collaborative learning. Fueled by the possibility of supporting collaboration through electronic tools, we get very excited about the synergies and surprises we might uncover by interacting with those we might not see often face-to-face.  We’ve always been enamored with collaborative techniques, of course, using project work, group research projects, and book studies to develop insights and promote learning.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve become immersed in “Collaborative Inquiry” – capital “C,” capital “I” – as a specific technique for learning and research, and this technique provides some guidance that I think we would do well to adapt in our corporate learning efforts. A colleague and I decided to assign a collaborative inquiry project to students in a doctoral course on adult learning, so I’ve plunged into the literature on collaborative inquiry as well as other participatory inquiry models. (Who knew there was a whole stream of literature on this?! That’s why I love teaching; I learn so much along the way!)

Several specific ideas seem to me to be important to transfer into the work I do in supporting learning in a corporate environment. 

> The primacy of learning from experience. Collaborative Inquiry requires participants to explore and dissect their own experiences related to the topic at hand - to share, discuss, reflect on – past and present personal incidents and the way they’ve made sense of those experiences. Collaborative inquiry invites participants in an inquiry group to experiment with new ways of behaving and acting in their day-to-day lives and to bring those experiences and their consequences and personal interpretations back to the group as new data for discussion and exploration. We all agree that we learn from our own experiences, but we seldom take time to deliberately pick out the lessons our experience has taught us, no less offer those experiences and lessons as fodder for group learning.

So imagine a corporate group research project that asks leaders, for example, to pool their experiences as a legitimate way of crafting a recommended approach to some management task or leadership role. In addition to searching for “best practices” from other organizations and reading books, articles, and research studies on a topic, the group would deliberately pick apart their own successes and failures to develop a deep understanding of the topic and build a rich recommendation for an approach going forward. I know that we often discuss our experiences as part of our work in these kinds of projects, but collaborative inquiry gives those experiences much greater weight and guides us to think more deeply about how to interpret those experiences.  Which leads me to a second collaborative inquiry characteristic we should adopt…

> The importance of critical, deep reflection on experience. The notion that we need to make more room for reflection in our lives is sometimes met with a degree of skepticism. Skeptics think that we naturally reflect all t he time, and the idea that it needs to be promoted in some specific way seems overkill. Skeptics are also very wary of the possibility of “paralysis of analysis” or over-complicating or over-thinking ideas when the obvious simple solution is really all that is needed. I understand those cautions. At the same time, the hectic pace of our lives leaves precious little time to think, and the quality of our reflection is heightened when we take the time to reflect with a group of people rather than only reflecting independently.

Imagine having a group of peers ask one another challenging questions about our facts, assumptions, interpretations, and future action steps. We all have our own lenses through which we filter our view of the world, and exposing our experience to other people’s lenses gives us a richer view. Group reflection isn’t about gathering others’ views about our experiences; it’s about allowing others to help us to test our own assumptions and deepen our own thinking about how we interpret those experiences. When we come together and discuss a variety of experiences, we begin to see patterns and issues that aren’t apparent from within our own views. Reflection takes time and practice, but well worth the effort.

> The value of mixing the lessons of experience with theory and research on a topic. Deliberately seeking out theory and research on the topic of a collaborative inquiry isn’t usually called out as a specific step in the process. But my colleague and I have made it a requirement of the course assignment, and it’s a great practice to get into if you aspire to scholarly or SMART practice. Reviewing academic and practice-based literature can help us to build language we can use to discuss our experiences, give us questions to ask as part of our reflection, help us to frame experiments and recommendations, and more.

Imagine expanding our understanding of a topic outside of the limited experiences of the people with whom we are collaborating, bringing in ideas from experts who have explored the topic before, and exploring perspectives that are brand new to us and exciting to consider. That’s what a deliberate outreach to research and theory can do for us, and our internet tools can make it easier to find and access those ideas.

> The power of the group as a learning space.  Pulling together a group of people to work together on an important question or practice is a frequently used strategy in business. Collaborative inquiry enriches this strategy by guiding the group to engage in rich dialog, to value each other’s experiences and the perspective each brings.  Collaborative inquiry creates an environment in which we can transform our own experiences into useful knowledge before the pace of our lives overwrites the lessons we might have learned.

Imaging having the time to really talk about our experiences, not in a formal “lessons-learned” report-out, but in an open and exploratory dialog. That’s why social gatherings are so important for innovation and engagement; it’s in these opportunities for reflecting together that real insight is gained.

Collaborative Inquiry (capital “C” – capital “I”) is defined as “a process consisting of repeated episodes of reflection and action through which a group of peers strives to answer a question of importance to them.” Doesn’t that sound exciting? Note the characteristics -
> “repeated episodes of reflection and action” – a collaborative inquiry isn’t just about reflection; it’s about action – putting ideas that the group explores into action in an ongoing experimental, experiential process.
> “group of peers” – in collaborative inquiry, everybody counts; every voice needs to be heard.
> “question of importance to them” – in collaborative inquiry, the co-inquirers have a stake in the topic at hand – no one is on the sidelines. They may look at the topic from different angles, and the topic may be important for different reasons, but this isn’t an academic exercise, it’s a personal one.

The purpose of collaborative inquiry is to construct meaningful, practical knowledge.  Isn’t that what we all need?

For more information on collaborative inquiry, I recommend Collaborative Inquiry in Practice: Action, Reflection, and Making Meaning by John Bray, Joyce Lee, Linda Smith, and Lyle Yorks.  (Sage, 2000)

Seven things I learned in 2010

Hard to believe another year has come and gone. For the sake of “auld lang syne” then, here’s a quick accounting of my significant learning achievements in 2010.  In no particular order…

> Constructivism
I did a lot of reading, studying, and teaching on the broad topic of constructivism, and I have a better grasp on it now than ever before. There are many nuances to this rich and fascinating philosophy/theory, so I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that I have constructed a perfect, complete understanding of the topic. But I do think constructivism best describes how we learn, and I’m beginning to really get a handle on what it means to “teach” with a constructivist point of view. Favorite book on the subject: Relational Being by Ken Gergen.

> Presentation Design
I had the pleasure of designing and delivering a number of webinars and live presentations on professional skill development topics this year, and I learned a lot about how to make that work.  I’ve learned how to craft a motivational story or flow, and how to design great visuals and animations.  I’m surely not perfect, but much better at this. It’s not just about getting the content and the activities right so that participants cognitively understand a message, it’s about building commitment and momentum for adoption of new practices so that people are inspired to do things that will allow them to be more successful. Isn’t that what we want at the end of the day? For the best tips and techniques, I recommend: Made to Stick and Switch, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, and Slideology and Resonate, by Nancy Duarte.

> SharePoint for Learning
My company is adopting SharePoint, and we’ve spent this year researching and imagining how to use it to support collaborative learning. Some folks might have you believe that all you need to do is make the technology available and get out of the way, and magic will happen.  But I think there’s a lot more to it than that, and I’ve studied how people have designed sites and promoted participation. I have learned about important design decisions that need to be made while creating the site, and about techniques to keep the site active and fresh. We’re just launching our first forays in the new year, so we’ll see if we got a good start.  I’m sure there’s much more we will learn along the way.

> Scholarly Practice
I worked on an article about SMART Practice, and that got me to more closely examine what we know about scholarly practice activities and competencies. It’s more than knowing the body of knowledge related to our work, it’s also about figuring out ways to stay current and to seek out and apply relevant research in day-to-day projects. I continue to believe that we are more impactful when we know the theory and research behind our practices, and figuring out how to support and promote scholarly practice is near and dear to my heart.  I’m grateful for the companionship of folks on the Scholar-Practitioner Special Interest Group of AHRD, and I’m looking forward to more work on this in the coming year.

> Learning by Teaching
Teaching is absolutely the best learning strategy. I love, love, love teaching – the prep work helps me to solidify my understanding of the topics I teach (adult learning and instructional design), and my students challenge my thinking and inspire me to want to do more to support their growth. Because I teach about learning and instructional design, there’s an incredible synergy between learning more about what I teach and applying it to teach more effectively. I continue to learn about adult learning theory, constructivist techniques, instructional design, and design considerations specific to e-learning. Whether I’m delivering workshops in a corporate environment or teaching courses in a graduate school, teaching isn’t work to me; it’s my favorite way to learn.

> Spiritual Growth
I’ve certainly traveled a bit down a more spiritual path this year, inspired by our church’s 90-day Bible Challenge this summer, multiple Christian Enrichment activities around Biblical themes and messages, great preaching, interesting reading, and lots and lots of quiet time.  I look forward to what’s around the bend for 2011.

> Blogging
I’ve learned as well that I really miss blogging. Taking a few hours to capture thoughts on what I’m learning and doing really helps me to process my actions, reflections, and readings. When things have gotten really busy – as they did this past fall, I’ve put aside blogging.  But now I find myself wishing I had written more so that I could go back and look up my thoughts on a subject. They seem to get lost otherwise.  I also learn a lot from reading other people’s blogs and following their Twitter feeds. So that’s one resolution for the new year.  If you’ve enjoyed reading my various musings and sharing your comments in return, you’ll hear more from me in 2011.

Happy new year!