Working in Movement

We have all heard the term "learning how to learn" at one time or another. It sounds like a good idea--learn a general set of skills that you can transfer to any learning environment you might encounter. But in trying to pin down this idea, I often run into problems. Chief among them is content. Can you learn, say electrical engineering with the same set of skills that you'd use in learning to ride a bicycle or hit a golf ball? And if the skills called for in different content areas are different, does learning different content areas have anything in common?

The sheer magnitude of work thrust upon a college freshman, for example, is often novel and overwhelming. This is particularly a problem for students with a so-so academic record, or those who come from schools that don't emphasize college preparation. What approach might such a student take to developing the learning skills needed? One approach is the Individual Learning and Motivation course designed by educational psychologist Bruce W. Tuckman at Ohio State University. Rather than loading up the students heads with traditional study skills, Tuckman provides opportunities to develop overarching management approaches that students can adapt to their particular situation.

Instead of lectures and assignments, the course uses a computer program to provide the students with immediate practice, frequent assessment, self-pacing and structured deadlines. The students learn to go at their own pace but still meet real deadlines. Along the way, they learn how to deal with procrastination, structure their time and absorb information in a way that makes sense to them. The program has been a success at Ohio State, and now Tuckman is developing it for urban high schools.

Another example of the learning to learn problem is in the technical world: information technology, engineering and the like. And, like the college freshman, this tech world sees an increasing demand to learn overwhealming amounts of stuff quickly, all the while reducing the cost of training. Useractive, Inc., a company affiliated with the University of Illinois is staking its business on a learning approach spelled out in this white paper. Useractive calls their learning approach Guided Active Discovery.

Traditional instruction, according to Useractive, relies on pushing information rather than leading the sttudent to develop ownership of the subject. We learn skills by doing them, practicing them until we "own" them. This doesn't happen by just having enough information about a subject. For example, no one has ever learned to drive a car by reading a book about it. You have to get behind the wheel and start reacting to all the things that make up driving a car in today's world. And you can't do it by just driving in a parking lot, either. To take ownership of the driving skill demands lots of experience on the roads, in real traffic.

Likewise, learning technical skills that are valuable in the marketplace demands developing ownership of those skills. This can be pretty costly and cumbersome in the IT world, since getting enough real world experience to own skills with software or computer languages calls for purchasing, installing and running those programs on the company's computers. Useractive's solution, using its approach to learning to learn, is offering access to it's own learning environment called the Learning Sandbox.

Learning to learn is at the heart of movement education. Specific movement skills, whether used for performance, athletics, or general self-use and discovery, can't be learned by studying information. All the biomechanical analyses of the golf swing won't get you very far down the fairway. Like the practical needs of the college freshman and the software engineer, it takes ownership to really master a movement-related skill.

Studying, engineering and moving more effectively are very different subject areas, so it's difficult to completely generalize learning skills to each specific one. But, an approach that emphasizes experiential learning and developing ownership of skill might well be the one size that truly fits all.