Attitudinal Based Learning: giving learners the choices they need
By Paul Dunn and Chris Finnemore (August 2004 Issue)
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You can take a horse to water, but how do you make it drink? You can coach, train and develop skills; you can even ‘accelerate’ learning, but these only ‘take the horse to water’. Ultimately, it is the horse that chooses whether to drink or not.
The basis on which a person decides to learn, to take on board new knowledge, to develop new behaviours and to ‘change’ is peculiar to each individual. Specifically, the decision to learn is driven by the perceived usefulness of new material and how well it fits to the learner’s existing map of the world. Attitudinal Based Learning (ABL) focuses on this decision-making process as the crucial set-up to any learning event. Irrespective of whether the overall outcome is skills or knowledge increase, whether the subject matter is technical or not, focusing on the learner’s attitude provides a more solid foundation for sustained change than traditional, content-focused models. This article aims to introduce ABL by:
* considering the thinking on which the concept is based
* exploring how it works in practice
* contrasting it with ‘traditional’ design methodologies
* providing a simple ten-step process to achieve attitudinal changes within your training.
THE THINKING BEHIND ABL
Malcolm Knowles, a well-known theorist in adult education, argues that adults require substantively different learning processes to children.1 While the pedagogic structures of classroom education, where the teacher is in control of what, when and how learning takes place, may suit children these methods are, at best, likely to meet resistance from adults. With a much stronger sense of self, adults require a learning process that enables them to fit ...
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