Teachable Moments

Learning is all about exploiting the Teachable Moment

10000 hours = three years in America. Longer in Europe...
This blog's about becoming expert in helping people learn.* Which, apparently, will take you a little bit longer than three years (if you work ruddy hard).

Becoming an Attention Ninja
What should you spend those three years doing? Keen observation, accurate feedback and perpetual iteration are one framework for developing expert intuition. As well as geeking out, unTrainers need to work on their noticing skills. We need to pay attention.

Structured Reflection
It's all well and good asking somebody to 'reflect'. But the road to Reflective Practitioner-ville is paved with good intentions and interesting diversions. Reflection, like learning, works best if there's a structure. If you can create your own little breadcrumb trail, your own structure, so much the better. Use your own wayfinding techniques.


Things I learned from a dead fish
Teachable Moments form the structure of my mental model for learning. Here's a moment from this morning. A story about dead fish in fMRI scanners reminded me of Anscombe's Quartet. I work with organisations on targets and performance management and these stories highlight the danger of relying too much on quantitative statistics. Hey presto! A teachable moment. (Note: I'm not saying I will use these specific examples with learners. They're the kind of thing I like but others won't, necessarily. But they have created an image in my mind of how I will structure future learning projects and conversations. Perhaps, teachable momentum might be a better phrase.)

Reading the phrase 'teachable moment' was itself a Teachable Moment.

Taxonomy of Teachable Moments
Moments might come from the news, the interwebs, history, fairy tales or even, though I doubt it, textbooks. Even better, they might come from real life. Amazing, I know. Mine are triggered by discovery, whimsy, problem-solving, satisfaction, delight - and pain.

Getting better at helping people learn is about noticing Teachable Moments. (And creating them. That's another post but I guess there's a clue above).

[Rootstalk and rhizomes: I came across the idea of the Teachable Moment reading Tom Atlee's Posterous. The link to Why We Learn More from Success came from Brain Friendly Trainer. The Teachable Moment this morning came from Twitter, which is a veritable gold mine of them. Follow me on Twitter, say "Hi" and share yours. More on Teachable Moments.]

*I believe that, inceasingly, professional trainers will manage Learning and Development as opposed to delivering it. The same thing will happen to workplace learning as happened to Corporate Presentations and the Training Department will be absorbed by the Knowledge Management department. This all seems more polemic than practical, though. So I don't talk about it here. If you're interested, let me know on Twitter or in the comments. I enjoy conversation.

[Images from Gravestone via Flickr Creative Commons]