The Smartest Guy In The Room

Warning: Contains Educational Theory Content. This could cause nausea, drowsiness, snoring, or extreme boredom.
I’ve done some kind of technical teaching or training for all of my adult life. Like most trainers, when I first started, my goal was to get an evaluation from the students that I “knew everything and could answer every question.” (This required, of course, hours and hours of study so that I could answer every question. I call this model of teaching “The Shell Answer Man.”) It really meant that I’d done a good job if I knew what every button, dropdown menu, shiny lever and hidden easter egg was for.
One day, I realized that I was bored to be answering the same ten questions over and over. I began to think about whether the people in my classes actually learned anything. (I hadn’t had any education about education — I was a talented amateur doing things to see if they worked.) So I started giving a little quiz now and then, doing a review at the end of the session, and other types of very basic assessment. The results were frightening.
Most of the information that I thought I was giving these people by speaking in a clear, loud voice wasn’t filtering in to their skulls. I tried harder — speaking slowly, enunciating clearly, repeating things several times. No real difference. (I considered just giving up on the “assessment” thing, as all it did was make me feel ineffective.)
Turns out that those “educational theory” guys knew this already — and had for years and years. (These are the same folks, of course, who lecture for a full hour in their college courses — and are highly paid and respected.)
I did hear that some things would increase the retention of information — having the student repeat the concepts out loud, draw pictures of them, teach them to a partner, use flash cards, chisel them in stone, build replicas out of mashed potatoes…
closeBut I found that what I used to be able to “teach” in an hour now took all day. Before, I could just shout out the facts and move on. Now my boss was really pissed at me. All the other trainers could finish that five day course in five days. Oh oh.
My students were ecstatic. They actually took real skills away, that they could use on their jobs. Instead of boring lectures, they got to build and do and draw and talk — much more fun than listening to me drone on and on. I taught Word by having them write and format letters of resignation to their boss. I taught Excel by having them create the books for a Mafia hit man. (“Bullets, May. $5”)
But I still had a problem. Some of the students could complete the tasks quickly, some not so quickly, and some would never be able to do it. I tried teaching at all three levels, having the quick ones work with the slower ones, and other desperate measures.
I finally realized (well, during the process of finishing a Master’s Degree in Education) that not all students are headed for mastery. Indeed, probably well under half of my students had a goal of learning how every single button worked. I’d managed to confuse MY goals with their goals. In my addled little type-A brain, it was a failure if they couldn’t do a complicated merge-purge without ever referring to a help screen.
At lunch today, I was talking to a friend about my experiences a few years ago as I began the process of getting a private pilot’s license. My instructor, an earnest young man with 1000+ hours of flying in his logbook, defined success as doing everything 100% right. Mine was doing enough things right that I didn’t die, break the airplane, or cause too much grief to other people in the sky.
So even when I managed to plant the damn Cessna down on the end of the runway with three bounces, we mostly focused on what I’d done wrong. And then had me do it again — and focus on the stuff I’d done wrong. I stopped taking lessons — ostensibly because of financial issues — but also because it just isn’t much fun to pay $150/hr to be told you’re dumb.
Back to education — the lesson here, if there is one, is that we all start our learning in a different place. We all are headed to a different definition of “completion”. And each and every one of those is valid. When I listen to a podcast while I’m reading mail, I probably only hear 25% of it. But that’s ok — it’s more than I’d get otherwise, because I don’t have a spare hour.
When I buy a Big Thick Book about a new software product, sometimes I only use it twice — looking in the index to answer a specific question. That’s ok, too.
I’m still working on mastery in a few areas — husband, friend, doggie daddy — but in many others it’s now ok to only learn what I need right now. It’s important to remember that when you think about designing any kind of learning materials.