Annie Murphy Paul: Exploring the Ultimate Learning Space

Those of us fascinated by learning and how we are affected by the places where learning occurs find ourselves exploring a wonderfully unexpected learning space in Annie Murphy Paul’s Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives: the womb.

It is Paul’s contention, throughout this well-researched and thought-provoking book and the “What We Learn Before We’re Born” TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk she gave on the subject in 2011, that we haven’t given nearly enough attention to all we learn and acquire in those critical nine months before we enter the world. Origins is a great first step in filling that gap.

Organized into nine chapters representing the nine months of the writer’s second pregnancy, the book takes us through tantalizing views of the latest research into what we learn and how we are shaped in utero—a somewhat different classroom than the ones in which we usually find ourselves. And one fascinating aspect of this particular journey is the number of parallels we find between that pre-birth learning space and the more familiar ones we inhabit. There is, for example, the Month Two exploration of how what our mothers eat while they are carrying us affects the lifelong tastes we develop and acquire; those of us involved in training-teaching-learning can quickly make the literal connection between proper nourishment and a learner’s ability to absorb what is offered in a learning opportunity, and we can also see the figurative elements of how what we are offered in the womblike setting of a physical or virtual learning space helps us develop a favorable or unfavorable response to the learning morsels we consume.

Paul’s Month Three explorations of how tremendously stressful situations—the 9/11 bombings, the Northridge, California earthquake in 1994, World War II-era sieges—affect mothers and the children they are carrying remind us that significantly less stressful situations can have significant and long-lasting effects on a learner’s ability to absorb and retain information. Her Month Six explorations of how a mother’s emotional state might have significant lifelong physiological impacts on her developing child parallel the positive and negative effects an instructor-trainer-facilitator’s moods and approaches can inspire or discourage in a learner’s intellectual development. And the concluding chapters leading us to the moment of her second child’s birth remind us of a variety of physical and emotional elements that teach the unborn child what to expect upon entering the world just as we, as facilitators of learning, convey important messages to learners about what they can expect and might accomplish once they leave our learning spaces and re-enter the world in which they live and work and play.

One of the more poignant moments comes at the end of chapter eight, when Paul recounts her experience of being jostled on a crowded subway train, losing her balance, and seeing the fruit and vegetables she has just purchased in a farmers market go careening up and down the aisles: “I look around helplessly, feeling like a child lost in a thicket of pant legs and skirt hems. Then one set of hands after another drops an apple into my bag. From the far end of the car, a piece of my fruit is handed from one rider to another until it reaches me. Another set of hands pulls me up and gently guides me to a seat. In that moment I don’t feel gawked or gaped it, embarrassed or self-conscious: just cared for, and grateful” (p. 223)

If we, as trainer-teacher-learners can provide the same sense of support, encouragement, and safety that Paul and her not-yet-born child found in that crowded subway, just imagine the sort of learner we will send back into the world from the womblike learning spaces we are capable of creating and sustaining.

As the writer herself observes, “…if we take care in how we think about prenatal influences, they may add another layer to our understanding of who we are and how we got to be this way” (p. 195). And if we continue exploring the parallels between what learners learn in utero and what they learn in classroom, we should be well on the way to helping build the sort of world our efforts can nurture.

Jay Mathews: Work Hard, Be Nice, Find Inspiration

Those of us engaged in training-teaching-learning are perpetual sponges—a form of existence that sometimes produces rewards in places where we least expect to find them. We would not usually seek guidance and inspiration for our adult-learning endeavors, for example, within the pages of a book about an innovative set of charter schools. Yet that is exactly what awaits us in Jay Mathews’ Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.

Let’s just acknowledge this up front: Mathews, as a long-time education writer for the Washington Post, displays an enviable ability to produce a real page-turner on a topic far from the top of the average person’s reading list; the narrative flow is far more engaging than much of what we find in contemporary novels, and the emotional engagement he fosters has us rooting for his protagonists and feeling the occasional personal losses he documents. And as he chronicles the story of Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin’s journey from being two inexperienced yet idealistic, highly energetic, and incredibly persistent Teach for America alums to running a successful and Charles Bronfman Prize-winning chain of charter schools—the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP)—nurturing disadvantaged children, he tells an archetypal tale that any trainer-teacher-learner can appreciate.

When we read of Feinberg and Levin’s efforts to find appropriate learning spaces for their young students, we are reminded of the challenges we sometimes face—and must remain committed to overcoming—in finding (or creating) onsite and online learning spaces that work for the adults we serve. As we read about how they recognized their own limitations as educators and how they pursued the best mentors they could find, we see patterns and practices that serve us day to day as we sponge up what we lack by learning from the trainer-teacher-learners we admire.

As we absorb the wonderful story of how they engaged their youngest learners in actions to shame reticent school district officials into action—thereby providing a lesson in civics by inspiring the students to engage in civic action—we have an extremely important example of the importance of providing learning opportunities that are grounded in experience that puts what is being learned into action—experiential learning at its best.

It’s not all rosy in Work Hard, Be Nice.  Mathews and his interviewees do not shy away from acknowledging the occasional small and large failures that sometimes come from overzealous actions—which makes the book even more valuable to those of us applying its lessons to our adult-learning endeavors. There are also reports from critics of the KIPP approach and from those who attempt to denigrate KIPP’s reported successes—higher test scores than seen among similar groups of students not attending KIPP schools, a willingness to spend much more time in classrooms than other students spend—by questioning whether it’s a learning model that can and does work for all members of its target audience.

We are, however, never in doubt as to where Mathews himself stands on the issue of whether KIPP is worth studying: “Over time, the debate about KIPP among educators has grown, full of misinformation and misimpressions because few of the people talking about KIPP schools have actually seen them in action,” he writes (p. 281). And he fully intends to continue exploring the KIPP model, he adds: “In the search for the best schools, I still have a lot of work to do” (p. 317).

And if for nothing other than the tenacity that Mathews and his subjects display in Work Hard, Be Nice, the book deserves—and needs—to be on every trainer-teacher-learner’s reading list. For inspiration. Assurance. And sponge-worthy material.

Rethinking Learning and Learning Spaces (Pt. 3 of 4): Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It

After devouring developmental molecular biologist John Medina’s Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and author-presenter-entrepreneur Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams (What Is School For?), we’re almost left with no other choice than to continue our rethinking by turning our capital-A Attention to Cathy Davidson’s Now You See it: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.

It’s not just that Davidson is an engaging, thoughtful, and thought-provoking writer; she also is a justifiably admired educator (former vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University) who clearly puts her attention on the learners she serves. And she has plenty to teach all trainer-teacher-learners about what we’re doing right as well as what we’re failing miserably to achieve.

Her goal, she tells us right up front, is to provide “a positive, practical, and even hopeful story about attention in our digital age” by exposing us to “ research in brain science, education, and workplace psychology to find the best ways to learn and change in challenging times” (p. 6). And she delivers. Convincingly.

Starting with a summary of an experiment that shows how much we miss around us by focusing too closely on certain details because we have learned to block out the overwhelming amount of stimulation that routinely comes our way, Davidson suggests that our learning process needs to include at least three steps: learning, unlearning, and relearning—and the sort of collaboration that allows us to rely on others to help us see what we otherwise would miss.

Now You See It walks us through that process. We travel with Davidson through studies of how gaming can effectively be used in learning. How engaging learners in the learning process by making them partners—as she did in an innovative course called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” —recreates the learning experience to produce tremendously positive results (including a sense of empowerment so productive that the learners actually scheduled an innovative class session while Davidson was away on business, much to her delight).

There are also wonderful stories illustrating the difference in attitudes between young learners—in a failing magnet school—faced with posted written rules (“Most of the kids are too young to actually read, so I assume this sign is as much a symbol as it is a message,” she quips) and with young learners in a demographically similar school that “exemplifies the best in public education” (p. 97). The classroom in the better school offers us a lesson relevant to learners of all ages: the room “is alive with life and spaces and animals and computers and interesting things, great stuff to look at and do things with” (p. 98)—a reminder that if we’re going to create effective learning spaces, we have to make them as interesting as the lessons we are trying to provide for learners of all ages.

It’s difficult to single out specific high points in a book so full of them, but one of my favorites is the entire seventh chapter—“The Changing Worker”—which provides a series of portraits of those who are providing the sort of workplaces requiring the type of creative, attentive, inquisitive, and flexible learners we need to be preparing whether we’re working in K-12, at the college and university level, or within workplace learning and performance (staff training) programs.

And that, Davidson consistently maintains, is what we’re currently missing in our learning and our learning spaces: we are relying on 19^th- and 20^th-century models that were appropriate for 19^th- and 20^th-century workplaces even though we’re clearly in that very painful yet dynamic transition to learning that supports a 21^st-century digital workplace and world: “In one generation, our world has changed radically,” she writes. “Our habits and practices have been transformed seemingly overnight. But our key institutions of school and work have not kept up. We’re often in a position of judging our new lives by old standards. We can feel loss and feel as if we are lost, failed, living in a condition of deficit” (p. 291).

Fortunately for all of us—and for the learners we serve—she offers plenty of guidance. Examples. And encouragement. Those of us who take the time to read—and reread—what she offers in Now You See It, giving it the Attention it deserves, may be able to help others past those feelings of loss and deficit and failure. And help ourselves as well.

Next: Rethinking With the Authors We Are Reading

Rethinking Learning and Learning Spaces (Pt. 2 of 4): Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams

If you think developmental molecular biologist John Medina’s ideas for rethinking leaning and learning spaces in Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School require a bit of an open mind, wait until you see what author-presenter-entrepreneur Seth Godin is (re)thinking.

In Stop Stealing Dreams (What Is School For?), Godin’s  newly released FREe-book (which is about the only term I can come up with to describe a book-length manifesto published free of charge online by someone whose work routinely reaches and inspires large audiences in traditional print form), he joins Medina and others in encouraging us to reconsider—and fight against—the ways our learning systems and learning spaces stifle creativity and steal learners’ dreams. And what he offers should be of interest equally to those working within formal academic settings and those involved in workplace learning and performance (staff training) endeavors.

It doesn’t take him long to get to the heart of our problems and challenges: “Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars…Every year, we churn out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor” in spaces far from conducive to learning even though that has little to do with what is needed to succeed in the contemporary workplace (p. 7). We use measurement tools such as multiple choice tests—created in 1914 by a psychologist and popularized by a professor who referred to it as “a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders” before disowning it as a learning tool a few years later, according to Godin (pp. 12-13). But we continue to use it in training-teaching-learning from the moment students first enter school all the way through the time we complete formal certification programs that are supposed to be offering some sort of guarantee to employers that the certified job applicants standing before them are fully prepared to meet those employers’ needs.

The “new job of school” is “to inculcate leadership and restlessness into a new generation” (p. 18) if we’re going to meet the needs of employers, communities, and the larger global community into which we’ve so quickly been thrust, he reminds us—and I would suggest the same should be said of workplace learning and performance offerings designed to produce the employees needed for workplace success.

Getting there is going to require that we more quickly move in the direction that our most innovative and forward-thinking learning programs are taking us: group (collaborative) projects rather than a reliance on rote learning so that no child (or adult) is left behind; learners who are encouraged to dream—and to act on those dreams—rather than learning ephemerally to pass tests and receive certifications; the nurturing of the artist—whom Godin defines as a person “who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better. An artist invents a new kind of insurance policy, diagnoses a disease that someone else might have missed, or envisions a future that’s not here yet” (p. 32).

We should, he maintains, “rebuild the entire system around passion instead of fear” (p. 37), and that includes focusing on learning as much outside as inside formal learning spaces by devoting time each day “to learning something new and unassigned” (p. 42) so we keep passion and drive in training-teaching-learning. We should also be encouraging “an open-book/open-note environment” instead of one where “drill and practice” is the default setting (p. 52). And one in which homework is done during the day in group settings while recorded lectures are delivered at night in online settings so that live instructor-learner time facilitates active learning and experiential learning rather than rote recitation and often unsuccessful attempts at passive absorption of material flowing from the mouth of an instructor to the often unreceptive ears of learners at the instructor’s convenience rather than at the learner’s moment of need—or passion.

School, Godin says toward the end of his manifesto, “needs not to deliver information so much as to sell kids on wanting to find it” (p. 78)—an overt reminder that learners of all ages benefit as much from getting away from us and following the leads we inspire them to follow as they do from taking in what we offer them (pursuing interesting discoveries, seeking exciting growth opportunities, and learning from those places and experiences where their learning passions lead them).

Godin begins Stop Stealing Dreams by providing the example of a public school where administrators “create a workplace culture that attracts the most talented teachers, fosters a culture of ownership, freedom and accountability, and then relentlessly transfers this passion to their students” (p. 6). The learning spaces he ends up describing are libraries “where people come together to do co-working and to coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring to bear domain knowledge and people knowledge an access to information” (p. 88)—the sort of space some of us are referring to as social learning centers or the new Fourth Place (both onsite and online).

For those of us immersed in serving learners who become dynamic members of our communities, the possibilities are inspiring.

Next: Cathy Davidson and “Now You See It”

Horizon Report Retreat (Pt. 3 of 3): Six Minutes of Inspiration for Trainer-Teacher-Learners

Sometimes it only takes a moment to change the way we view the world; at other times, it takes a little longer.

The talks that have been taped and posted on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) website often, in 18 minutes or less, are powerful enough to change our worldview. And in a reduced format through a “Six Minutes With” series of presentations that ran through the three-day New Media Consortium “Future of Education” Horizon Project Advisory Board retreat in Austin, Texas last month, there were plenty of transformative moments that can now be viewed via links on the Horizon Retreat wiki.

Since these were great thinkers rather than time-keepers, those “Six Minute” segments sometimes ran upwards of nine or twelve minutes, but I suspect none of the attendees was watching the clock. Our eyes and ears were focused on the speakers, and the messages were clear: We’re in an exciting and dynamic period of change in the world of education, technology, and creativity, and each of us involved in training-teaching-learning has a tremendous role to play.

Marsha Semmel, who oversees and coordinates Institute of Museum and Library Services partnerships with other federal agencies, foundations, and non-governmental organization, reminded us that “people go to museums and libraries…because they are places of curiosity, wonder, imagination. They are places that use different styles and promote different styles of learning, and they invite cross-generational learning…Learning is about passion. It’s about motivation. It’s about play. It’s about imagination.” Throughout her presentation, she outlined the educational and cultural roles museums are playing, and suggested that “we are in a period of lifelong, life-wide, life-deep learning, and every single organization and institution has to belly up to the bar and be part of the solution.”

Susan Metros, Associate Vice Provost and Associate Chief Information officer for Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Southern California, talked about how leadership lives within each of us. To give a framework to her presentation, she summarized three books that have influenced her as an leader within education: Edward De Bono’s Lateral Thinking, Amos Rapoport’s  House Form and Culture, and Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life.

John Weber, Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, opened his presentation on “Museums and the Digital Space” by suggesting that “we love our gadgets; we are addicted to them. We obsess over them. We compare them. We update them constantly.” In a focused discussion on how those gadgets fit into the museum experience and its educational offerings, Weber maintained that museums “are very beautiful spaces. They contain objects which are unique, which surprise us, which, generally speaking, exist only in one place and they foster intense, particular, irreplaceable experiences, flashes of recognition and flashes of surprise…We want now to bring our gadgets into museums…We want to photograph what we see in museums…We are photographically addicted, including me…At times, that can really get in the way of seeing it.” But, he concluded, “in  the end, it’s all about looking at the art objects, and how can we empower that” so visitors will “linger longer and get more out of the time they spend with us in real space, in museum space.”

And then there was the final “Six Minutes” presentation—“Reflections: The Horizon Project at 10”—by NMC Founder/CEO Larry Johnson. Using “the language of image,” Johnson’s presentation was a magnificent and heartfelt combination of photography, philosophy, and call to action. Taking us through a brief history of networked technology at the personal level of how it has been used by his family, he recalled how radio was at the center of his father’s life; how television was the technology of choice as he was growing up; how computers have become “the network” for his son, and how mobile technology is what is at the center of his very young grandchildren’s lives. Furthermore, he said, his son corrects him when he suggests that “the network has been built out to help us in a myriad of ways.” For his son and his son’s contemporaries, “The network is us. It doesn’t help us. The network actually is us. We are the reason there is a network, and the network is here to serve us.”

His grandson and others growing up today, he continued, “will never ever live in the world where the network wasn’t anywhere he wanted to be. …What does that mean for what we do [as educators]?…We have to be careful that we don’t spend the money that we have on solutions that are not going to be used. We need to make sure that we’re not giving people this technology [radio] when, in fact, the world they live in has changed. The thing we need to focus on is how do we keep the magic in learning? …We need to make their jaws drop. We need to make them understand that the world is so cool that it’s worth their curiosity, and that’s the message I’m going to leave you with. This is the room to do it. We’ll do it together.”

And if all of us who serve as trainer-teacher-learners take that message to heart and become part of the group that helps to shape the world as it is changing all around us, we can help reshape the horizon we all spend time exploring.

E-learning Professionals in the Learner’s Seat

Those of us involved in preparing and providing e-learning opportunities are also pretty happy consumers of learning opportunities, Patti Shank confirms in her latest report for the eLearning Guild (eLearning Degrees and Credentials: Needs of the eLearning Professional, published in August 2011 and available online free of charge to Guild members).

Reporting on responses from more than 500 Guild members, Shank tells us that four out of five respondents recommended the academic and certification programs they have pursued or are pursuing, and “[t]he vast majority of the respondents were happy with their programs” (p. 15).

In the larger context of her topic, Shank leads us through the needs and motivations of e-learning designers and providers; calls our attention to certification programs including ASTD’s Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) designation and others; and looks at current and desired job responsibilities for those pursuing degrees and certifications.

“One of the major conclusions of this report is that both credentials and skills are important to respondents,” she writes (p. 21), with the additional warning that “If you’re complaining that people are talking about technologies that you think couldn’t possibly be used for learning and don’t know the lingo that others are using, you’re in the danger zone. That’s not a good place to be for eLearning professionals.”

The motivations are clear: nearly a third of the respondents work in instructional design and want to advance their careers in instructional/educational technology, while another third of the respondents listed instructional design as an area of study. A much smaller group works in instruction/teaching/training/coaching (14%), and only 10% of the respondents listed instruction/teaching/training/coaching as a desired job responsibility—less than the 15% who said they “desire to be Independent Consultants or Executive Management” (p. 8).

Shank offers the useful reminder that “you’re unlikely to learn everything in the eLearning field in one degree program. Many people attend multiple programs, such as obtaining a Master’s degree and a Certificate of Skills, for this exact reason” (p. 10). And she warns that “keeping their skills fresh is a moving target” (p. 10).

Which, of course, reinforces for so many of us the idea that we need to see ourselves as trainer-teacher-learners if we want not only to keep up with those who rely on us for continuing education, but also if we want to excel at what we do in a world where those who take a break are liable to find ourselves facing an even steeper learning curve than we would if we simply incorporated all three elements of our work into our day-to-day routines.

Brains: Our Learning Tool in Action

Trainer-teacher-learners seem to explore almost every aspect of the learning process imaginable. And yet there’s a basic tool we all too often overlook: the brain itself. Which is a terribly embarrassing oversight since we are, without it, literally nothing.

Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself offers a great starting place for those of us interested in plugging that gap in our knowledge. It is firmly rooted in the physiological basics of how brains learn and adapt—literally changing, as our experiences change, through the process known as neuroplasticity.

Those willing to take the time to read the entire book will follow Doidge’s explorations documenting how a variety of terribly challenged people have overcome tremendous physical and psychological disabilities far beyond the day-to-day issues confronted in our training-teaching-learning efforts. There are, for example, case studies showing nearly miraculous recoveries by a woman who felt as if she were perpetually falling, a man with severe stroke-induced impediments, a woman who had been written off as “retarded,” and a woman who literally grew up with half a brain.

Trainer-teacher-learners with less time to spare can move right to the heart of Doidge’s writings on the physiology of learning by diving into the third chapter, “Redesigning the Brain”—a fascinating and game-changing exploration of the work on neuroplasticity completed by University of California, San Francisco professor emeritus Michael Merzenich.

In one particularly dense yet well-synthesized passage, Doidge helps us understand how neuroplasticity and learning come together in the work that trainer-teacher-learners facilitate: “…Merzenich invoked the ideas of Donald O. Hebb, a Canadian behavioral psychologist who had worked with [Wilder] Penfield. In 1949 Hebb proposed that learning linked neurons in new ways. He proposed that when two neurons fire at the same time repeatedly (or when one fires, causing another to fire), chemical changes occur in both, so that the two tend to connect more strongly. Hebb’s concept—actually proposed by Freud sixty years before—was neatly summarized by neuroscientist Carla Shatz: Neurons that fire together wire together” (p. 63)—which, to bring this all home, simply means that when neurons fire together during the learning process, our brain creates connections that turn ephemeral potential learning experiences into the long-term behavioral changes that effective learning is meant to produce.

The converse, Doidge notes, is also true: “…Neurons that fire apart wire apart—or neurons out of sync fail to link” (p. 64).

Understanding the basics of neuroplasticity helps us understand the challenges our learners face. There are, for example, times in our lives—early childhood being one that is easily and commonly recognized—when learning appears to be easier for us: “Language development…has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person’s ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue,” Doidge notes (p. 52). But this is far from an excuse for those who believe they simply are too old to learn new tricks—or more substantial lessons; the more we and our learners remain open to new experiences, the easier it is for us, physiologically, to maintain our brain’s plasticity—which translates into an ability to continue learning.

“Merzenich thinks our neglect of intensive learning as we age leads the systems in the brain that modulate, regulate, and control plasticity to waste away,” Doidge writes. “In response he has developed brain exercise for age-related cognitive decline—the common decline of memory, thinking and, processing speed” and his efforts are producing noteworthy results (p. 85).

The conclusions for those of us involved in workplace learning and performance or any other educational endeavor are obvious. If we want to help our learners, we have to make them aware of what it takes to expedite learning. And in a wonderfully circular way, we have the documentary proof here that the more we continue to learn, the easier the learning process remains. Which is great news in a world where the need for learning is continual and those who either are unwilling or unable to continue learning are at a distinct and potentially life- and career-threatening disadvantage.

“Just doing the dances you learned years ago won’t help your brain’s motor cortex stay in shape,” Doidge suggests. “To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus. That is what will allow you to both lay down new memories and have a system that can easily access and preserve the older ones” (p. 88).

“Plasticity,” he assures us, “ is a normal phenomenon, and brain maps are constantly changing” (p. 61). It’s clear that one of our many roles as trainer-teacher-learners is to do all we can to make learners aware of this situation so they take advantage of the possibilities it offers.

Char Booth: Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning, and a USER at the Center of the Process

Doctors have medical school and residencies. Attorneys have law school. And trainers have…well, those involved in workplace learning and performance often have little more than a nudge from a supervisor or a colleague and the command to go show someone how to do something that they should have known yesterday.

Char Booth—a writer, teacher, trainer, librarian, and colleague whom I very much admire—documented a small piece of this too-familiar picture through a survey she completed: “…only about a third of those who regularly teach and train in libraries completed education-related coursework during their MLS [Master of Library Science] studies, only 16 percent of which was required. Strikingly, over two-thirds of these instruction librarians felt that their LIS education underprepared them to teach…”

“Many library educators,” she continued, “are involved in instruction on a part-time basis and therefore lack the immersive challenge that allows other educators to develop skills quickly and keep current and engaged”—a situation that applies to a far larger group than those providing training for library staff or library users, as a phone call from a non-library colleague who is about to face her own first group of learners without any formal training in how to help others learn reminded me this afternoon.

Booth has done more than simply document a problem affecting trainers, teachers, and learners. By writing Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators, she has created a first-rate resource for those new to training, teaching, and learning. The book is an engaging, concise, and welcome guide to creating engaging learning experiences for learners of all ages, and it’s a tremendous gift not only to those inexperienced trainers and teachers who are about to work with their first groups of learners, but also to anyone wanting a first-rate survey of key instructional design techniques and learning styles.

Furthermore, Booth introduces her own variation on the familiar ADDIE—Analysis, Development Design, Implementation, and Evaluation—model through her four-step USER—Understand, Structure, Engage, and Reflect—model that, through its name, continually reminds us who we are working to reach through formal and informal learning opportunities.

Among the real gems in Booth’s work is the fourth chapter, “A Crash Course in Learning Theory.” An introductory paragraph at the beginning of the chapter helps ground us in our field of play: “The first major modern school of educational thought—behaviorism—investigated animal responses to different kinds of stimuli…which inspired the common practice of providing positive reinforcement for correct answers. A second school of thought—cognitivism—explores the capacities of human memory, which inspires teaching and design techniques that reflect the brain’s information processing abilities. The most recent school—constructivism—explores the effects of individual perception and the social environment, which have led to more collaborative and self-directed learning strategies” (p. 36). And she circles back to the theme at the beginning of the next chapter with a critically important reminder that leaves us grounded rather than confused: “It is not necessarily desirable to choose one theoretical model over another” (p. 50).

She leads us through the “ten transformational trends in educational technology” surveyed by Curtis Bonk, author of The World Is Open: “web searching in the world of e-books, e-learning and blended learning, availability of open-source and free software, leveraged resources and open courseware, learning object repositories and portals, learner participation in open information communities, electronic collaboration, alternate-reality learning, real-time mobility and portability, and networks of personalized learning” (p. 72). And she follows that with an introduction to Robert Gagné’s “series of principles that link all design models”: “Design is more about improving learning than improving teaching…Learning is a process influenced by many factors…The design approach can be tailored to fit different learning scenarios…Design is iterative—it informs itself in an ongoing cycle…Design is a process consisting of steps and substeps…Different learning goals call for different instructional approaches…” (p. 86).

As she moves into an explanation of her newly developed USER model, she leads us to a helpful structure designed to produce effective learning: “In the USER method, goals focus you on your instructional role; objectives organize content into activities and content units; and outcomes describe how participants are substantively different because of the knowledge they have gained,” she writes (p.118).

Booth’s approach never loses sight of the fact that we are well served both by having formal learning models from which we can draw and also by remembering that not every learning opportunity requires that we engage in every step of an instructional design assessment, development, delivery, and evaluation process. “More than anything, it should remind you to teach simply, reflectively, and with the learner at the center,” she reminds us (p. 94).  The overall message she delivers is that “reflective and design-minded teaching leads to effective, learner-centered instruction. Librarians are redefining our value in a changing information paradigm, and it is essential that we perceive the role of education in this process” (p. 151)—a goal that any teacher-trainer-learner is likely to embrace.

Pat Conroy, Tony Judt, and Exemplary Learning

Two of my favorite authors—novelist Pat Conroy and historian Tony Judt—have wonderfully autobiographical books out, and both have much to offer trainer-teacher-learners and writers.

Conroy’s My Reading Life interweaves ruminations on authors and books that have deeply influenced him—Gone With the Wind, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Wolfe, and many others—and in the process also draws us into what they offer. Furthermore, he crafts splendid portraits of those around him who have, through books or by serving as the inspiration for characters in his own work, made him the writer that he is.

Nowhere does he more clearly touch those of us involved in workplace learning and performance, however, than in his essay “The Teacher.” Recalling how he first met high school English teacher Gene Norris in 1961, Conroy holds before us the person we all need to be: the one who recognizes the potential in his learners, who remains a lifelong source of encouragement to the student Conroy was and obviously still remains, and who continues to serve as a mentor and a friend as he was struggling with leukemia. Norris, even in his final days, encouraged Conroy the student to “Tell me a story.” All of us should be lucky enough to have that sort of trainer-teacher-learner in our lives and, more importantly, remember to emulate them.

Equally compelling, for entirely different reasons, is Conroy’s “Why I Write.” Whether it is because he touches the basic insecurities all of us—teachers, trainers, learners, and writers—have when he writes “I have been mortally afraid of the judgment of other writers and critics since I first lifted my proud but insecure head above the South Caroline marsh grass all those years ago” (p. 303) or because he leads us through our struggles by confirming that “Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear” (p. 304)—a challenge all of us face when we attempt to translate difficult concepts into terms our learners can grasp and absorb—Conroy nearly leaps off the pages of My Writing Life to encourage us to join him on his learning journey.

Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet is equally compelling and poignant in what it offers. Like many of us involved in training-teaching-learning and/or writing, Judt relied on his communication skills to help us learn a bit of what he knew. To read his final essays, composed while he was dying from a degenerative disease—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease—is to spend time in the company and the mind of a teacher-learner-writer who remained unwilling to surrender until death claimed him earlier this year.

Limited in mobility and communication tools, Judt turned inward in this terrifically moving book and explored, from a variety of angles, the way we swim in what we’ve learned for comfort in times of great adversity. The opening essays, “The Memory Chalet” and “Night,” lead us through the world of a writer who has to rely on others to move his thoughts and words onto the pages we are reading. He invites us to walk with him through his years at Cambridge, on a kibbutz, and in the various jobs he held while preparing for the life of a teacher-writer-historian.

And as we reach the end of what he has left us, he explores, in “Edge People,” the concept of identity and how it ultimately is shaped by all that we experience: “…within the university, many colleagues look upon me as a reactionary dinosaur. Understandably so: I teach the textual legacy of long-dead Europeans; have little tolerance for ‘self-expression’ as a substitute for clarity; regard effort as a poor substitute for achievement; treat my discipline as dependent in the first instance upon facts, not ‘theory’; and view with skepticism much that passes for historical scholarship today” (p. 205).

If more of us, as trainer-teacher-learners and as writers, can hold ourselves and the learners we assist to those magnificent standards of clarity, discipline, and healthy rather than cynical skepticism, we will remain true to the spirit of the Conroys, Judts, and other inspirational figures we have been lucky enough to encounter. More importantly, we will fulfill our promise as members of a magnificent continuum of creativity. And learning. And life.

–Written in memory of Robert Zimmerman, a great friend, mentor, and colleague who succumbed to cancer on December 26, 2010. Thanks, Bob, for teaching me how to “fire on all cylinders.”

The Spirit of Volunteerism (3rd of 3): David Moebs

 

Having spent time recently writing about Sarah Houghton-Jan and Lori Reed, two trainer-teacher-learners who embody the true spirit of volunteerism in all they do, I’m turning toward another friend whose volunteer efforts in the world of nonprofit organizations provide a timeless example of how those facing tremendous challenges sometimes keep the rest of us inspired.

David Moebs has touched and changed a lot of lives through his commitment to the arts. A professional clarinetist and teacher working with children through the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Department, he attracted significant numbers of undergraduate- and graduate-level students to the school while also employed in its admissions office, and his efforts on behalf of his fellow musicians in the Sacramento Symphony until the organization folded in 1996 gave him a level of credibility others might not have achieved.

Like Sarah and Lori, he accomplished much of this after learning that he was facing severe physical challenges: he was diagnosed as being HIV-positive in 1985.  During the initial years after he received that diagnosis, this wonderful educator volunteered for clinical tests designed to find ways to lessen or eradicate the effects of AIDS. He maintained his position as a Conservatory employee, a Prep Department instructor, and member of the Sacramento Symphony. And he continued, with whatever free time he had, to work on behalf of those he cared about by volunteering to serve on the Symphony musician union’s negotiating team during extremely stressful discussions even though he understood that the effects of that stress might have devastating effects on his health.

Remembering some of the difficulties he had as a young gay man in a less than accepting environment, he looked for ways to help others in a similar situation better cope with the challenges they faced. Wanting to use his knowledge of and passion for the arts in those endeavors, he enrolled in a creative writing course and considered adding coursework to his already busy schedule so he could earn a counseling degree which would qualify him to work with gay teens who needed all the support they could find.

When David’s health took a drastic and potentially fatal turn for the worse with a diagnosis of Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy—PML—most of us assumed he was finally out of time. As PML rapidly progressed over a two-month period by consuming significant levels of the myelin sheath around his nerves, his ability to play clarinet rapidly disappeared. Along with his ability to move and talk and maintain his independence. But his sense of humor during that awful period of time never failed; as a few of us were watching television together one evening and sat through a commercial citing the symptoms of diabetes—all of which matched parts of what he was experiencing—he looked at us, smiled, and struggled to say, “Oh, thank God; I thought I had PML.”

The rapid decline appeared to reverse itself on Thanksgiving morning that year; without warning or explanation, he was able to get out of his bed, walk around a little, and eventually join us for a Thanksgiving meal. Over the next few months, he began feeling well enough to attempt to play the clarinet again. He took steps to register for those counseling courses he had been hoping to complete. And he even began driving short distances again.

But at the end of what appeared to be an entire year of recovery, the effects of PML became apparent once again, and within a few months he was no longer able to remain at home even with the around-the-clock care friends and professional nursing staff were struggling to provide. So in May 1998, he moved into Coming Home Hospice, in San Francisco’s Castro District. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, his friends would sometimes see him reach into the air and flutter his fingers.

“Was he a musician?” one of the hospice attendants asked. “It looks like he’s trying to play an instrument.”

We gladly volunteered to hold his hands and rub his back long after he stopped giving any sign that he knew we were there. His eyes stared blankly up toward one of the corners of the ceiling.

“We call it ‘watching the angels,” a hospice worker told us. “It’s very common when the end is near.”

I read him passages from his favorite books even though there were no visible responses, and I didn’t care whether he was trying to communicate with me or was simply displaying reflex actions when I felt his hand squeeze mine a couple of times.

And when he passed away, exactly eleven years ago, I knew I’d lost an irreplaceable friend. Who continues to inspire me to watch for the angels in my life. And to volunteer in every way I can to carry on the spirit they embody.

–In memory of David, January 27, 1959 – June 6, 1998