Dave's Whiteboard

Last week, I found myself in a couple of discussions about the difference between training and learning.  I only took one philosophy course in college, and later on I hollowed out the textbook to hide a gag gift, so it’s clear I’m not that contemplative on this issue.

To oversimplify, many people in more traditional training jobs felt strongly that there is such a thing as “training” and that it has the potential for great value.  Other people, by and large on the you-manage-your-own-learning side, seemed to place little value on structured training as such.

Although I doubt most participants intended it, you could interpret the divergent views as “this is important work I’m doing that helps people become more productive” versus “get out of your rut.”

Maybe not a rut, but at least a well-worn path.  I’ve spent a lot of time in that corporate-training path: 7 years at Amtrak, 18 at GE, and much of my consultant career since.  Usually I’m far from the executive suite, so I have some sympathy for challenges that first-line and middle managers face together with their work groups.

Which is why, over and over, I recommend Robert F. Mager‘s What Every Manager Should Know about Training.  Not just to clients (though I’ve even sent the book as a gift when I thought it would be well received) but to the corporate trainers supporting them.

It’s not a scholarly book, nor a thick one; you could probably read the 140 pages in two hours. But in that space, Bob Mager works hard to get managers out of the training-as-dosage mythology.

• Rule 1: Training is appropriate only when two conditions are present:
  • There is something people don’t know how to do, and
  • They need to be able to do it.
• Rule 2: If they already know how, more training won’t help.
• Rule 3: Skill alone is not enough to guarantee performance.
• Rule 4: You can’t store training.
  • Use it or lose it.
• Rule 5: Trainers can guarantee skill, but they can’t guarantee on-the-job performance.
• Rule 6: Only managers, not trainers, can be held accountable for on-the-job performance.

Mager: “If training is only a means to an end, what is the end toward which it strives?  It’s performance.”  Someone familiar with concepts like ISPI’s human performance technology model (links to a PDF document) recognizes exactly what Mager’s doing: smuggling performance improvement into the organization.  He’s just hidden it in a plain brown wrapper that’s labeled TRAINING.

He was clever in choosing the title, because I’d argue the majority of people who supervise or manage in organizations use “training,” at least in casual conversation, to mean a whole complex of things related to getting people to produce valuable results on the job.  Instead of trying to convert them to performance-improvement or informal-learning jargon, Mager starts where these managers are likely to start.  Then he builds on their likely experience in other dimensions of work to help them see how training (as a structured approach toward helping people acquite skills they don’t have) is one part of overall performance.

In the chapter, Where the Magic Goes In, Mager addresses another concern managers have:

Instead of asking, “How long will it take to develop my course?” you might consider asking:

What can you do for me with the lead time I’ve got?…

For example, if [the training department has] only two days for training development, the most useful thing they can do is to verify whether training is a valid solution, and to verify which solutions will have the greatest impact on the problem.

If the trainers have time to do one more thing, a task analysis would be the most useful action.  These analyses can be turned into checklists in a matter of minutes, and the checklists can be given immediately to the instructors…and to the trainees, to show…what competent performers can do….

If there is time to do one more thing, trainers can derive the objectives of the instruction and then draft skill checks by which instructional success can be measured…

…Which, by the way, isn’t a bad way to think about any sort of guidance you’d like to provide other people.

My driver’s ed instructor told my class:

You never have the right of way.
You can only yield the right of way.

Recalling this precept got me thinking about driver education / driver training, and that got me thinking about how people have very different readings for “training,” “education,” and “learning.”

Learning to drive is a good example of a complex skill (the kind van Merrienboër and Kirschner grappled with in Ten Steps to Complex Learning).  We tend to think we know what the outcome of the education or training will be: a good driver.

But what’s that?

On the formal side, it’s really about passing requirements.  If you’re an adult who moves to Maryland, for instance,  you have to:

• Pass a vision test
• Have had an out-of-state license within the past year (no suspensions)

And if your out-of-state license expired a year ago, you have to take “the knowledge and skills tests,” which I take to mean a road test and what was once known as a written test.

I’ve been driving for more than 40 years and have had licenses in four states, but I don’t recall taking more than one road test.  Not that I’m eager to do so, but you do get the impression that if you pass it once, still drive, and haven’t lost your license, you’re doing okay.

Some of what vM&K would call constituent skills for driving are recurrent ones–how to start the car, how to stop, how to steer, how to recognize signals and respond to them.  But there are many non-recurrent skills (things we do differently in each situation).  The other day I was exiting a strip-mall parking lot, wanting to turn right onto the highway.  An oncoming car on that highway had its right turn signal on.

Did that mean he’d be turning into the lot I was exiting?  How could I tell?  How could I help a novice driver figure that out?

My old instructor’s advice about right of way was a kind schema or mental model, like the two-second rule–one way to help new learners acquire cognitive strategies.

In writing about this, I’m seeing more clearly that there’s also an overlap of stakeholders: the general public (represented by the state) wants the roads to be safe; new drivers want to be able to drive; parents want their children to drive safely.

They might not even agree on the outcome.  Is it “status as skilled driver” or simply “holder of a driver’s license?” Is “skilled” the same as “safe?”

(I can answer that one: no.  Just take a drive through heavy traffic with someone who prides himself on what a skillful driver he is.)

Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Adminstration publishes a skills log and practice guide “to help the new drives gain valuable experience in operating a motor vehicle in a variety of conditions and highway environments.”  Maryland now requires 60 hours of supervised driving prior to taking the tests, with 10 of those hours at night.  The parent, guardian, or mentor of the new driver must sign a statement attesting to this, in addition to the 6 hours of behind-the-wheel instruction in the mandatory driver education course.

I like the guide (other than the mid-60s bureaucratic tone of the writing).  A “planning guide” (on the right; click for a larger version) summarizes skills; individual sections amplify them with descriptions, examples, and checklists.

Because of the state’s interest in having competent drivers, it makes sense for the state to have created this.  Is 60 hours the right amount?  Are these skills the right skills?  Will parents or guardians follow the guide, or simply certify that they had?

I can’t say–and, frankly, neither can you.  This is a complex skill; there’s no one right answer.  I think you can make a case that most of the skills in the guide are basic ones for a competent driver.  At the same time, no test is going to guarantee that a new driver, or even an experienced one, will never have an accident.  (I’d settle at times for “will not talk on the phone while driving.”)

How can people be more productive while working on complex tasks?  One approach involves a driver, a navigator, and a pomodoro.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Jim Remsik describes a way that programmers at Hashrocket (a web development company) write software.  (Full article: For Writing Software, A Buddy System.)

The quick summary: two programmers sit side by side.  One (the driver) writes the code.  The other (the navigator) checks, critiques, and offers suggestions.

As the code’s being written.

Remsik says that when senior and junior programmers work together, the junion person might start as the driver, “which may encourage the senior person to become a better teacher.”

Hashmark finds that the driver/navigator system increases productivity.  The collaborators not only switch roles (you don’t drive all the time) but also partners.  The programmers refer to that as “promiscuous pairing.”

As Remsik says, “People have different talents, and this way the expertise is spread around.”

Working like this can be exhausting, he says.  I think that’d be even more the case if you don’t get along that well with your partner, at least initially.  The fatigue factor is one reason that Hashmark uses the Pomodoro Technique.

Briefly, that involves breaking tasks into small chunks and working steadily for 25 minutes.  After that, you take a break–even if you’re ready to keep going.  At Hashmark, the phrase to encourage  driver and navigator to take that break is, “Respect the tomato.”

(Pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato.  Here’s a one-page summary of the technique; you can find out more at Francesco Cirillo’s site, The Pomodoro Technique.)

I spend a lot of time working on my own, and sometimes wish I did have a close collaborator.  I benefit from having someone to consider possibilities with, although I’d hate to debate serial commas or how to phrase feedback, time after time.

The pomodoro notion intrigues me–instead of saying, “I’ve gotta spend a good three hours on this,” which can sound like a sentence, the approach sounds more like “Get Thing A done, take a breath, then move on to Thing B.”

CC-licensed images:
Motorcycle and sidecar by BotheredByBees / Peter Shanks.
Pomodoro juice by Tanzen 80 / Antonio Fucito.

In last night’s lrnchat (a Twitter-based discussion), someone asked how apprenticeships fit into the context of social learning and informal learning.  I think of the best apprenticeships as combining planning and structure, on the one hand, with open-ended opportunity for trial-and-error.

The reality of traditional apprenticeships was that they were often time-focused rather than outcome-focused.  Indenture contracts could bind a person to a seven-year apprenticeship.  The guild controlling a particular craft had a vested interest in limiting the supply of officially qualified craftsmen.

Collins, Brown, and Holum, in their 1991 article on cognitive apprenticeships, saw four key aspects of traditional apprenticeships:

• Modeling: Here’s how to do it.
• Scaffolding: Try this one first.
• Fading: Now that one.
• Coaching: Here’s how you did;
  here’s how you do it.

The Collins article also sees four types of content in a cognitive apprenticeship: domain knowledge (e.g., how the world of civil engineering is organized), heuristics (tacit skills of effective civil engineers), control strategies (how to choose and when to switch your approach), and learning strategies (how to deliberately get better at what you do).

Cognitive apprenticeship is not a model of teaching that gives teachers a packaged formula for instruction. Instead, it is an instructional paradigm for teaching. Cognitive apprenticeship is not a relevant model for all aspects of teaching. It does not make sense to use it to teach the rules of conjugation in French or to teach the elements of the periodic table. If the targeted goal of learning is a rote task, cognitive apprenticeship is not an appropriate model of instruction. Cognitive apprenticeship is a useful instructional paradigm when a teacher needs to teach a fairly complex task to students.

Cognitive apprenticeship does not require that the teacher permanently assume the role of the “expert”–in fact, we would imagine that the opposite should happen. Teachers need to encourage students to explore questions teachers cannot answer, to challenge solutions the “experts” have found–in short, to allow the role of “expert” and “student” to be transformed. Cognitive apprenticeship encourages the student to become the expert.

There’s a vital role for planning and organizing, though.  I see the potential neglect of that role as one of the greatest drawbacks to so-called informal learning.  If you haven’t thought carefully about a set of skills and the contexts in which someone applies them, you’re likely to emulate less-effective models–and then to solidify them.

The announcement in the image below seems to be more serious about qualifications than some of the shopping-mall ear-piercing services I’ve seen.

CC-licensed images:
Feline apprenticeship by cjc4454.
Piercing apprenticeship by dreamsjung.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article about the effect technology can have on families (Breakfast Can Wait.  The Day’s First Stop is Online).

You can imagine the examples: “All four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms,” says one parent.  A fourteen-year-old “went from walking the family Labradoodle for 20 minutes each morning to only briefly letting the dog outside” — and blames Facebook (and the peer connections it delivers).

The Times article seems an apt companion to a New Yorker article: Don’t! (subtitle: the secret of self-control).  Based on experiments he conducted at Stanford with young children, Walter Mischel believes a child’s ability to postpone eating a marshmallow was a good predictor of things like the ability to plan, maintain friendships, and do well in school.

Marshmallows?

The experiment involved nursery school children.  A child picked a treat (like a marshmallow or a cookie).  The experimenter made an offer: you can eat the one treat now, or, if you wait while I’m gone, you can have two when I return.

Once the experimenter left, the child could also ring a bell, which would bring the experimenter back.  (My guess is that this allowed the child to put an end to what must have felt like endless waiting.)

What happened?

[The typical child] struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than threde minutes….About thirty per cent…successfully delayed gratification til the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later.

Mischel’s conclusion is that the crucial skill for these “delayers” was ” the strategic allocation of attention.”  They found ways to distract themselves from the treat.

“What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says.  “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards.  They would think that the bst way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal.  But that’s a terrible idea.  If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

Mischel and others are currently on a new study on whether self-control skills can be taught — a form of metacognition, a way to help children manage their own behavior.  Last year, for the charter-school organization KIPP, Mischel and Angela Lee Duckworth are currently working at this.  They find significant improvements in things like the ability to deal with “hot emotional states,” though they’re cautious about claiming any long-term results yet.

This TED talk by Joachim de Posada deals with those Stanford experiments.  As he says, “To tell a four-year-old kind to wait 15 minutes for something they like is equivalent to tell us, ‘We’ll bring you coffee in two hours.”

I can imagine a whole trademarked line of “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow” stuff, and in fact there are books and seminars.  What I’m more interested in is how solid the connection may be, and how people can build their ability to delay.

My image adapted from two CC-licensed photos:
A stopwatch by casey.marshall and marshmallows by John-Morgan.