A model for learning.
As I was editing the first battered oak video, doubt kicked in. In a deviation from the normal tree related stuff, I present a model for learning which has been on my mind for a few years.
When editing a video in which I climbed the battered oak tree to make some pruning cuts I began to doubt a few things. A fair few things actually. This doubt is known to me and is something I often experience. The doubt was beginning to convince me that not only should the video not be published, but maybe I should just knock the whole video thing on the head. It takes ages, seems to generate little in short term wins and generally it is a club that I beat myself over the head with. Beating yourself with a club is a theme we will get into here.
Understand that I've learned a few new skills so far in my orbits around the sun and I am mostly self-taught. The fancy pants term for this is "autodidact", but I tend not to use that term as it is a bit snooty. "Hello, I'm an autodidact", said no one you ever wanted to spend time with. In being self-taught and having been through a two year PGCE in adult learning, I haven’t been able to stop myself from constantly analyse the learning process over the years. I imagine it is like the medical student who starts diagnosing themselves. It’s a slippery slope.
Not that it matters but there were three reasons to not publish the video. The first reason was that there was little, if any real action. Yes, I climbed a tree using ropes and a harness but there didn't seem to be any real action. Just a series of wobbly close ups of leaves against the sound of my heavy breathing and the wind. The second reason (which affected the first) was footage related - I had incorrectly positioned the camera angle on the helmet so the chainsaw is very rarely in the shot. Finally, I'd filmed a lot that day and I didn't format the memory card after it's last use and so I ran out of space. This meant that the story had no ending - a fatal error in story world. My doubt had nearly convinced me that these issues were grounds to not publish the video. Nearly convinced me.
As I mentioned above, I know this doubt. You could say we're close colleagues. Calling us friends would be pushing it, but we certainly do our best to maintain a solid working relationship because ultimately we both benefit from eachothers presence. Most often the doubt pops in for a visit when I am comparing myself to others in the world who do the thing I am learning. The doubt may also rock up in situations when I'm 1:1 with someone else in a formal or informal competition of some sort, perhaps a sporting event or a call with party X's legal counsel.
Cutting to the chase here - doubt is a feature of a successful learning experience. In this little post I'm going to take a a little break from treeworld and attempt to lay out a model for the the learning experience that takes "the doubt" into account. I'm doing this because it transforms how you might experience "a bad day" when learning a new skill. Whilst it cannot make a bad day or bad experience any less unpleasant, it can certainly be a much needed silver lining on the otherwise sky of gloomy clouds.1
Learning a skill
The story we're sold (or at the very least allowed to assume) at school, or university, or on the job or anywhere that we learn is that learning looks like this.
However, this model of learning is a trap and if you hold it as truth, it'll also become the club that you will use to beat yourself over the head whilst telling yourself that you're rubbish. A lot of people have held onto this model their whole lives and use it to re-enforce the idea that they're a "bit thick" or "not clever". This is a shame because most of these people are in fact, quite intelligent in their own creative ways. That however is a different issue, connected with the "business of education"2.
What I want to do in this post is to show you that, just like the cake, this linear model of learning, is a lie.
The Up & The Down
When I learn something new and learn just enough to be able to “to do a thing” I often get a feeling of limitless ability in this new skill of mine. Often I am either in, or have just come out of some kind of formal learning environment (a tutorial, a training course, treeschool etc etc) and I call this frame of mind "the up".
However, when I start doing the thing away from that learning environment, none of it ever seems to goes to plan. New problems, unforeseen and seeming difficult or unsolvable begin to emerge and merge and integrate with each other until ultimately a giant pile of failure presents itself which causes my life outlook to become all doom and gloom. I call this frame of mind "the down" and if a picture says a thousand words then this is it...
So what's going on here? You're learning, that's what's happening. You had "an up" in which you learned a new thing which did X, Y and Z and the next result was that you received a dopamine boost (natures OG drug). This is nearly always the advertised part of a learning experience. But then you attempted to use that new skill, and for whatever reasons you came to see where your understanding had holes it in. Because the experience didn't meet your expectations, you had "a down" and no doubt you blamed yourself because for some reason it has to be you. "Everyone else is doing great" you may think to yourself.
"The down" is never advertised in learning experiences and for good reason - it'd kill sales of those learning experiences. However, "the down" is an intrinsic part of learning and even if it could be minimised or removed3 I don't think it'd be wise to do so.
Let's tweak that model to account for the up and the down.
Rather than a line, we have a wave where the peaks are the bits where you feel awesome as you climb towards mastery. The going is easy and the views are spectacular. But then there's the troughs, which feel awful. They mark a descent in which you feel like you know nothing. They smash you into reality with a the harshest of wake up calls, abandoning you in a trough of your own sadness. Sad for you.
Moving forward with blind dedication.
Now that we've visualised the ups and downs, we can account for them as part of learning and when we do so they become a feature and not a bug. When "the doubt" rocks ups or we have "a bad day" we can understand that we're on "a down" and that as long as we can muster a reason to "get back on the horse", then logically we can understand that "an up" will follow. You'll have to figure how what works for you in order to get back on the horse as what works for me probably won't work for you. Whatever this reason for getting back on the horse is, lets just call the process of moving forward dedication. It's not a perfect term, but it works. Dedication is what keeps people doing something that they otherwise may not do.4
Let's adapt the model a bit to account for dedication.
We're getting somewhere now. The wave has two parts: the up where everything is great and there's the down in which everything is not great. There's also dedication and that gets you back on the up. As an engine for learning, this model produces energy. It isn't going to make a downer of a day or a downer of an experience any less easy to get out of, but it does frame it as evidence of learning rather than a failure of learning.
Actual Skill vs Perceived Skill.
My Life of Treedom is one giant learning experience. A new business, a new life, new problems, new skills, new work / life balance, new smells (Yes, I now smell different - mostly of sawdust, petrol and tree) and on most days I have "a down" of some sort. The down I had when I was editing the video and watching myself was especially poignant because the reality of my actual skill level didn't match what I thought was my skill level for multiple (and already listed) reasons.
Let's bake perceived skill and actual skill into the model. Unsurprisingly perceived skill tracks against the peaks of ups, and actual skill tracks against the troughs of downs.
When I drew the above graph I tried as close as possible to model a typical learning journey that I've come to expect over the years. The interesting thing here is the initial over inflated sense of perceived skill. It happens nearly every time. More interestingly is how long it takes my own assessment of my actual skills to reach that level. There's a reason for this. The gap between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge is a surface area in which two non-stop two operations are taking place.
The first operation is when you're on "the up". You're taking things that you knew you couldn't do ("conscious incompetence") and turning them into things that you can now do ("conscious competence"). This always feels great because you expected it. It feels just like an 80's pop montage in any fist-pumping-feel-good-movie.
The second operation that happens on "the down". In this operation you are forced to acknowledge the stuff you didn't know you couldn't do ("unconscious incompetence") and place it into the already large pile of stuff you knew you couldn't do ("conscious incompetence")5. This may be one reason for the initial over-inflation of perceived knowledge.
As you progress towards mastering something, the gap between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge should shrink. But when you’re learning there’s always going to be an altering distance between the two. In my experience, the bigger the distance, the bigger the doubt is when it shows up. This may seem fatalistic, but remember that this model uses doubt and bad days as a feature and does not class them as bugs. So when you do have a particularly long and intense visit from doubt always remember that it is because you’ve moved a tonne of “stuff” from unconscious incompetence where you were unaware of it, into conscious incompetence. Yes, it sucks that you now know there’s more to learn and the journey is harder and longer. Sad for you – that’s learning.
Sometimes it is easier to visualise the four competences thing so here it is below.
In the version I’ve drawn above I don’t make a thing about moving from conscious competence to unconscious competence. We casually call unconscious competence “second nature”. I’m not claiming it isn’t important in the formal model, I’ve left it out because when you’re learning something new you’re just happy to be able to do it.
Conclusion
Over the years, I've watched a lot of people beat themselves over the head when they've had a day in which something either didn't go as planned, or took longer than expected. Currently, I see it at treeschool but I've seen it in contexts from something as physical to weightlifting to something as purely cognitive as writing code. When learning, you're going to doubt yourself and have bad days. If you're under the spell of the linear learning model you'll tend to club yourself over the head with the doubt and bad days because there's nothing else to do with doubt or bad days in the linear model. Their existence isn't even acknowledged and so the student assumes it is they who are at fault and not the model.
Under the nameless non-linear model I've laid out above, doubt and bad days become a feature, not a bug. They become a marker that demonstrates that your current state as a learner is progressing towards mastery and away from that of the novice. It doesn't make either the doubt or a bad day easier to deal with (it actually probably makes it harder, but that's a good thing in my book) but it does at the very least prevent you from clubbing yourself over the head with them because they're accounted for, they have a purpose and their expected.
Whether or not you've got the dedication to "get back on the horse" after a downer is up to you. Rocky said:
[Life] ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
But life is not a movie, things are rarely that simple and Rocky is a fictional character.
What is real however, is beating yourself over the head. So stop doing it.
The linear learning model is a lie.
Thanks for reading,
Cheers,
Jamie.
I'm not getting into teaching theory (fancy pants term pedogogy or andragogy) or any one school of learning (fancy pants term epistemology, variants of which include behaviourism, constructivism and humanism) because all of these things are only distantly connected to you when in the thick of learning. Neither am I going to mention Blooms Taxonomy or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you’re serious about learning, you should familiarise yourself with these two models though. They are bloody useful.
“Do Schools Kill Creativity” by Ken Robinson never gets old for me and is very insightful into the idea that our education system isn’t really about “learning subjects” as it so much about “unlearning creativity”. Creative people are dangerous don’t know you. We have all kinds of ideas about current and alternative policies and we typically define our own “choice architecture”. You gotta catch those creatives early though – educate it out of them to keep everyone else safe.
On the surface you learned you were not as good at something as you thought you were – sad for you. However under the surface hide your next lessons, they are the raw materials for "an up". Removing these raw materials to avoid some superficial sadness seems like a weak reason.
I'm not calling it motivation because I find motivation to be the bank loan that's rescinded when you're skint. Motivation is the umbrella that is taken away when it rains. It is a fair-weather friend and you'd do well not to rely on it. Motivation, at least for me, is only present on an up. Enjoy its company by all means, but don't put stock in your relationship with motivation.
There's also the stuff you didn't know that you know ("unconscious competence") but that's not really relevant as by nature you don't know you can do it, and thus you don't need to learn how to do it. At best it is a nice feeling every now and again. That being said a lot of the models for the four competences hold that unconscious competence is the goal. Second nature kind of thing.
This is what I call a good read :-)
Your wavy learning model makes a lot of sense; I think it's very insightful. I'll come back and read this piece again later, to put it in the mental knapsack.
"Creative people are dangerous don’t you know" -- I know. Sometimes I think that essentially, creativity is asking "but what if it was differnt?", "why does it have to be like this?" or "what if we did it this way instead?". People understandably hate that. They have spent quite a lot of time and energy acquiring a working model of reality. Don't upset the mental cart!
As for videos; Most things can be shown with a good picture, but some things (processes) are best conveyed with video. Most videos are way too long. I've only dabbled with video editing and found it's a struggle to get the length down -- gotta be ruthless!
Wow, done it again Jamie got my head reeling…