How do You and Your Team Learn?

You may or may not be surprised to know this, but your university professors were not trained to be educators. They're trained as scholars and researchers. As a newly minted Ph.D., I was in a classroom with 40 to 100 students for whom I was responsible. And while I knew how to teach (that was something I had done as a graduate student) I did not know how people learn.     

From then on, I've read and thought a lot about the learning process.

The literature on this topic approaches it from various sources and perspectives. There are many pedagogical strategies and approaches, and they all have something to contribute.  However, I always return to the basics — or, to put it another way, the foundational pieces of research that teach us how to move from novice to expert (regardless of where we are on that path right now).   

One of my favorite resources on this topic is a publication by the National Research Council called How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Although it's geared towards a classroom, the foundational knowledge applies across avenues of teaching (like training and coaching professionals, teams, and cohorts, for example).    While our understanding of learning is always evolving, we'll spend the next few newsletters learning and implementing the key findings and the relevant takeaways for you and your team.     

Key Finding One: We come to any new learning with preconceived ideas and notions that are a product of many, many things—our upbringing, our past educational experiences, our culture, our socioeconomic status, as well as our personal and professional experiences. Every person walks into a learning environment with a different frame of reference and/or starting point.     

When you are instituting or learning something new - or doing so with your team - they're not approaching the idea or task from the same place.  This doesn't mean that some of them are smarter than others.  Rather, this means that they'll absorb, understand, react to, and make sense of the idea, process, learning, or skill you are presenting from their prior and current knowledge of that subject, which is highly affected by their personal and professional experiences.   In other words, they've already learned something on the subject at hand, and it's important to understand the context for, and the background of, that learning. 

Key Takeaway: ask questions before the learning starts.  

For example, at True Contributors, we conduct one-on-one interviews with every team member as pre-work for training. We want to understand people's current understanding, comfort level, engagement, or commitment to learning. If you're planning to teach yourself or your team something new - whether it's a new process, skill, or technology -  ask questions first so you can understand where everyone is at before you get started.    For example, let's say that you're the lead HR executive at your firm, and you notice that morale is low and turnover is high in a key department.  You learn that there are a series of unaddressed conflicts on the team.  Some team members struggle with giving feedback, and others avoid it entirely.  It is clear that a training is needed to help the team succeed.     

Before you institute that training, it's critical to understand where individual team members are on the topic of conducting a difficult conversation - to learn what they already believe to be true about the importance of difficult conversations, and what they think is necessary to perform them well.  

The answers will (likely) vary widely.     

It is just as important to understand their comfort level with conducting difficult conversations and what they believe to be true about giving and receiving feedback.  For example, when is it important?  When is it necessary?  With this knowledge in hand, you'll understand where to begin, where to fill in gaps, where the trouble points are, where to push, and where to step back and let the team lead.  This way, you're creating a relevant learning environment that reflects your specific team.  

If we don’t understand where we or our team are coming from, or where we currently stand, we can't chart the right path for growth, development, and learning (for success!).   Stay tuned for our next newsletter, where we'll discuss the second key finding and takeaway for how you and your team learn.    

Ok, now it's YOUR turn. What learning do you or your team need?  What do YOU need to learn to create the right learning pathway?