Leadership Training Chapter 2 – What is Education?
Chapter 2 – What is Education?
A Short Introduction to Levels of Learning and Building Block Training
Has anybody ever asked you, “What is education?” Many years ago, when I was becoming a flight instructor, I learned that education is classically defined as creating a change in the behavior of your students. At the time I thought – and I think it’s still a very common thought – that education is the process of an instructor owning a pile of information and somehow cramming it into the student so that student then owns that same pile of information. In some ways that could be considered a form of education, but if the result does not change the behavior of your students, then it’s not really successful.
What does a change in behavior mean? How do we look at this? Let’s go from zero to hero in a very small step, taking scuba diving as an example.
Using Levels of Learning to Change Behavior
When we train new scuba divers, there are some behaviors that we have to change. One of those behaviors is holding your breath. Most people who come to scuba diving from snorkeling know that when they are snorkeling they have to hold their breath underwater. That is their current behavior. We have to use training to change that behavior to breathe underwater. There are two ways to do it:
- Tell someone not to hold their breath while scuba diving.
- Using Levels of Learning, take someone through the process of breathing underwater, stepping from rote learning, to understanding, to application, to correlation. The levels or learning are rote, understanding, application, correlation.
Here is how levels of learning work in our scuba example:
1. Rote
Tell someone not to hold their breath while scuba diving. Then give them an underwater air source and have them practice breathing in and out underwater in a controlled environment, like a pool.
2. Understanding
Explain a principle called Boyle’s Law, which states that as pressure increases, the volume of a gas decreases.
Demonstrate this in two steps: first, explain that increased pressure is caused by the weight of the water pressing on you, so the deeper you go, the more the weight of the water and the more the pressure. Then take an air-filled balloon
underwater and demonstrate that the deeper you go, the smaller the balloon gets, because the increasing water
pressure is decreasing the volume of air in the balloon.
3. Application
To apply this to diving, do the reverse of the above example. Start underwater with an empty balloon and fill it with compressed air from a scuba tank. Then, as you bring the balloon to the surface, watch it expand.
4. Correlation
Apply this to your lungs. If you fill your lungs underwater from the compressed gas in a scuba tank, as you ascend and pressure is reduced, the volume of gas in your lungs will expand. If you do not give that gas someplace to go by keeping an open airway and continuously breathing, your lungs could overexpand causing a very serious injury as you ascend. In other words, correlation is the thinking stage of training.
If we just told a new diver not to hold his or her breath during ascent, there is nothing they can connect to and the impact may not be felt which, in turn, means the student may risk injury by not absorbing the “advice” given during the rote stage of learning. But if the new diver knows the ramifications and the theory behind the task, he or she takes ownership of the information and we, as trainers and mentors, have succeeded in changing behavior.
Using Building Blocks to Change Behavior
I was working with a software engineer who teaches coding and we looked at a similar scenario. He was very conscious of the fact that in order to change his students’ behavior, they had to first go through a series of steps so they understood why they were doing something. You cannot start at the
end – it doesn’t work.
Software is a great example. You cannot just show someone how to code something that is complex. You must show them the basis for the coding, what you’re trying to accomplish, what the initial concept is, and then you can let them discover how to write the specific code.
We will explore both of these topics – levels of learning and building block training – in much greater detail in upcoming chapters.
