Eiffel Over

Tag: LearningJourney

  • Setting learning goals vs. seeing what happens

    This came up in a recent training course. I always ask people what they want to get out of a training programme. To set themselves some learning goals.

    But how do you know what you want to get out of a training course before you start? 

    An alternative, more emergent approach might be to attend the course, be open-minded, and see what you can take from it. By setting goals, aren’t you shutting down possibilities that you hadn’t foreseen?

    I think the best course is somewhere in the middle: to set out on the training with some intentions, but to be open to what comes up. This requires us to be iterative in our learning. We need to set goals, take some action, and then see what happens. 

    We may discover along the way that there is something else that we wanted to learn. Fine — then adjust your goals.

    But, as my mentor, Prof Søren Wilert once said to me, if you don’t know where you were trying to get to, you can’t assess the success of your actions.

  • You only learn when you do difficult things

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist website: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    This is my catchphrase for the start of workshops: ‘You only learn when you do difficult things.’

    It is a reminder to expect things to be difficult when we try to do something new. We often learn something in order to make something we can’t do easier. And we should expect to put in some activation energy during this process to reach a place of greater ease.

    But if left at that, this is quite a passive interpretation. 

    A more active interpretation is to use your sense of what is difficult to orientate yourself to where the learning opportunities are. And this, I think, is the sense in which this catchphrase was meant when I originally heard it. The words come from my friend and mentor in Problem-Based Learning, Prof Søren Willert.

    In problem-based learning, we are looking for problems as an opportunity for learning. In these instances, learning isn’t general, it is tightly bound to the specificity of the problem.

    Seeking difficult things might actually serve as a good compass for where to focus our learning. A place where there is work to be done, where we can hopefully make a positive contribution and learn along the way. We mustn’t expect it to be easy.