Live and let learn

Coming from a science/engineering background, I love breaking ideas and knowledge down into little manageable pieces. It’s so satisfying to feel that you’ve broken down a new mountain of a problem into lots of small chunks that you understand. In fact, the process of breaking things down myself helps me to categorise and understand the task at hand.

But what about when someone else has already done all the hard work (and most of the learning) for you by breaking down a problem, or lets say, a qualification, into small manageable pieces? How useful is it for me to work through someone else’s breakdown of their learning? Where’s the challenge? Where’s the story?… where’s the motivation?

I’ve been browsing through some books to find out what I can get out of the new TAA04 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment… not because I have to, but because I’m excited to find out what might be new since I ‘completed’ my training. But when I reached page 123 (corresponding to the second performance criteria of the third element of the second competency unit in the course), I couldn’t help but poke my head up for a breath of fresh air… I felt like I was bogged down in so much detail… too much detail to take in… hopefully the image helps you see what I saw.

To be fair, I am skimming through the learning as I’ve “done it before”, but as my motivation and engagement have dissipated I can’t help feeling that working through Competencies, Elements and performance criteria is perhaps not the best way to learn - even though they may be perfect for categorising and checking-off the desired behaviour.

Sure our training packages talk about holistic assessment etc., but the framework of CBT has certainly directed the ‘delivery’ of learning on the book I’m reading (Learning Design - Participant Guide, from Pearson Education). I’d much rather get together with a bunch of other people interested in helping others learn and then work out what we think is important ourselves. It may be that we’d differ from the Cert IV qualification, and we’d probably not go into so much detail, but I’m certain that I’d learn a hell of a lot more through the process of thinking (and debating) rather than being spoon fed my desired behaviour. We could then evaluate our actual practice with our own set of desired skills and knowledge to see where to focus our own learning… setting our own (achievable) learning goals and learning tasks.

And here’s a thought, how about instead of ‘completing the course’ we could instead be enrolled for life, perpetually reflecting on each others learning (using blogs or other communication tools) and meeting up each year (?) to formally review our previously-developed goals and priorities together as well as create new goals and priorities as our practice evolves…

Who knows, perhaps the official set competencies, elements and (all 200) performance criteria could form a great way to evaluate our own thinking?