Self organised learning

Self Organised Learning is a liberating, exciting process in which the learner embraces the full responsibility for learning. They hold conversations in which they construct and exchange personally significant, relevant and viable meanings with intent and controlled awareness.

Introduction

Have you submitted yourself to these myths?

We need someone to teach us new skills.
Learning is a painful, boring and awful experience.
We have to be driven – hard.
We only learn from hard knocks.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Learning is a lonely process.
We know all we ever will.

Contributing authors show that:

Real learning is our individual responsibility. The learner does not need someone else to tell them what and how to learn. Passing exams is not the issue. The process of deep learning is.
Learning is a joyful, empowering and compelling skill that can be learned and improved.
The learner should set their own pace and standards for learning.
We don’t necessarily learn from hard knocks. Learning comes from a responsible, conscious, purposive, reflective approach to experiences.
We do not have a fixed capacity for learning. Each of us can broaden the scope and improve the quality and rate of our learning, regardless of our measured learning speed, aptitude, talent or intelligence. Opportunities for learning abound. The person who has mastered the discipline will be able learn from almost any circumstance.
We benefit from assistance in learning. The assistance is best given in a manner that is supportive rather than directive, challenging rather than judgemental, conversational rather than bureaucratic and adult to adult rather that parent to child.
Through Self Organised Learning we can generate new areas of knowledge.

Learning maturity

As we mature as learners we can expect to move through the following five stages of learning skill, each with predictable, measurable outputs:

Rote – memorising without judgement.
Coherent – finding patterns congruent with an internal view.
Operational or explanatory – finding a way to apply what is learnt.
Constructive – constructing additional meaning to what is learnt.
Creative – gaining significant insights that change perspectives and actions.

Figure 1: learning.

Three stages of awareness

We can also expect to experience three phases of awareness of how we operate and learn.

First a robotic, unconscious, non-reflective stage in which we are almost completely unaware of how we are doing a task and our beliefs, values and prejudices about learning remain unarticulated.
Second we begin to experiment with what we have to learn to do our task better.
Finally we reflect on the learning process itself as we review our experience in the learning experiments and considering our thoughts and feelings.

The following tools can facilitate the learning process for the learner

Personal Learning Contracts

This is a contract the learner makes with themselves to develop skills and learning capacity. The learner records their reflections, on the contract, about how they are learning, what they are learning, and how this affects their performance. The Personal Learning Contract allows the learner to think positively and constructively about their learning competence and provides a vehicle for learning conversations with their peers or a learning coach.

This is very different from the learning contract an organisation sets up with an employee to manage their training.

Self debrief (reflection)

The learners own reflections are absolutely essential to Self Organised Learning. First the learner reviews the information collected in the Personal Learning Contract including:

Feedback on the learning conversations.
How the language they use about learning changes over time.
Feedback on the support dialogue reflecting the learners’ struggles with new skills.
Personal insights from reviewing themselves against their critieria.

Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed how no system can be completely explained from within itself. And this is true for learning. An external party can identify aspects of our experience of which we may be totally unaware.

The learning conversation

Conversation with a learning coach allows the learner to externalise the concepts and make explicit their attitude and skills. This includes three distinct but interwoven dialogues covering:

Content, the Personal Learning Contract and the learning process and how it can be applied in other areas.
Support for navigating the deconstruction and change brought on by learning.
A review of the learners own performance criteria which may give input to self-appraisal, personal development-plans, career development, training needs-analyses and management development audits. However this is not about submitting to the criteria of others or being “marked” on their progress. Conflicts between external and internal evidence for learning provide the agenda for coaching conversations with the learner.

The effectiveness of the reflection depends on the richness of the record of the event. A video or a transcript of each learning event are useful.

The learning conversation usually begins at the tasks and skills level, governed by the Personal Learning Contract. Over time the conversation will move to a Life-context (Why am I even learning this stuff?) and to the process of learning itself (learning to learn). The coach would benefit by being prepared for these changes and encouraging the investigation of each arena

The coach passes control of the learning conversation back to the learner as part of the closure.

Personal Learning Biography

A chart of the learners progress facilitating the participation of others in the learning conversation.

Conclusion

Self Organised Learning is a way of life focussed on the learning required to thrive on the edge of chaos and navigate the exciting waters between the doldrums of extreme comfort and the devastating storms of unchecked and unrealistic enthusiasm. The learning coach supports the learner in dealing with the anxiety of settling in this region.

What makes Self Organised Learning a compelling approach to coaching is that on the surface it seems so obvious, but the contributing authors, Harri-Augestein, Webb, and Thomas, have created structures to draw the uncommon out of what seems at first to be common sense.

Self organised learning