Don fears our schoolroom assumptions are limiting opportunities for workplace learners.
I am optimistic about the future of L&D, and with good reason. We’ve learnt more about the brain in the past two decades than we ever knew before. The web has revolutionised the accessibility
of information. And above all, in the emerging knowledge economy, developing personnel has become a serious matter for most organisations. There is one thing holding us back. I call it the schoolroom assumption.
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It’s the assumption that the best way to learn is the way we did it at school or, more precisely, the way we remember being taught at school.
Most schools today adopt a variety of approaches to teaching, including discovery and debate, but that isn’t what managers and employees at work remember. They remember the physical environment of the classroom and the adult-child power structure of the lesson, the model of knowledge transfer involving an expert at the front of the room, conveying information into pupils’ heads.
This assumption is pretty uniform across income, race and age. The result: a view that learning is synonymous with the experience of our schooldays. None of this is an attack on schools. There are good reasons why schools have to run the way they do.
Neither is this an attack on the classroom. There are times when a physical environment is the best place to learn, and times when an expert instructor or facilitator is invaluable. However, the schoolroom assumption does create two insidious effects.
First, there is the assumption that all learning, rather than some, should happen via a course in a classroom. Second, and to my mind more importantly, are the implications for personal responsibility.
At school, it wasn’t we pupils who set the curriculum, homework and expectations. As we grew older, we were given more responsibility, but were never put entirely in charge. Any trainer who has ever opened a course to hear the words, “I’m here because I was told to come,” knows that this position is still far too widely accepted both in the classroom and online.
If learning and development is as important as we in L&D surely believe it to be, this attitude has to change. Part of the reason is practical: no L&D department today has the resources to provide all employees with directed training on everything they might need to know. There is too much there, and it changes too fast.
The other part follows on from this: adults usually know what they need to know. They may need some help, but a self-starting learner, encouraged and supported by their workplace and guided by their L&D department, will learn faster, be more useful to others, and have a more valuable career as an individual. Fostering that attitude of responsibility, I believe, is key to the future success of organisations today.
Schoolrooms belong in school. At work, it’s better for everyone if we can treat adult learners like adults.
About the author
Donald H Taylor is a 25-year veteran of the learning, skills and human capital industries. He blogs at www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk
