What Can Be Taught: Part II
September 17, 2009
In a previous column, ("Things That Can't Be Taught"), I opened up the idea that there are some things that can't be taught, even though some e-learning tries to teach them. Then, in Part I of this article, I looked instead at things that can be taught and began outlining the different ways through which we learn them, which can be categorized into the processes that inform them: conscious processes, subconscious processes, analytic processes, and mixed processes.
In Part I, I wrote about learning through conscious processes. Here, I will look at the other three.
Subconscious Processes
1. Step-by-step: Learning to execute a step-by-step subconscious process .
Most of what we know how to do we practice on a daily basis. We may have consciously learned each step initially, but over time and with practice, we begin to do certain things mindlessly.
For example, we can talk and drive a car at the same time. Driving is more difficult while talking on the phone because we have a tendency to look around and change our gaze unintentionally while talking on the phone, hence distracting us from the road. When we ride a bicycle or sign our name, we are tapping into a subconscious process. Speaking and understanding our native language uses a subconscious process. When we watch a sporting event, we use a subconscious process. We react quickly and easily without knowing the details of what we're doing or how we're doing it.
When we try to consciously modify such processes, by telling ourselves to listen more carefully or watch the ball more intently before swinging, for example, we often cannot actually change the behavior.
We learn by doing in the beginning. Once we have fixed ways of behaving, we typically stop learning. To gain a subconscious process, one simply has to do the thing all the time, and it gradually improves. There's no substitute or shortcut.
2. Artistry: Improving an artistic (no defined rules) judgment.
There are no rights and wrongs in what we like, but there is general agreement about what makes a work of art great. The factors to be considered are not necessarily conscious, although for experts they typically are.
In these more subjective and subconscious areas of life and learning, it is more a matter of trying to understand what feels right than to understand why it feels right. There is a difference between being someone who can make an artistic judgment and being an art expert. One might learn to notice things that one had failed to notice before if someone takes the time to point them out. Learning to make artistic judgments is about learning to notice and appreciate one's concept of beauty, which changes when one's focus changes.
Practice is a key idea here as is the assembling of a case base to use as a comparison set. Nevertheless the comparison set is not usually conscious. One can like something because it is pleasing without realizing (or caring about) why it is pleasing.
3. Values: Making a value judgment.
Values are another subconscious idea. We don't necessarily know the values we have, and we haven't necessarily learned them consciously. We should value human life over property, but whether we do or not we only find out if the situation arises. Perhaps husbands should value helping their wives over watching football, but that doesn't mean they will.
It's tempting to try and teach values, but values are acquired so early in life and in so many subtle ways that nobody over the age of 10 is likely to be much affected by someone else tells them they should or shouldn't value.
In important areas of life, on the job and in child-rearing, for example, our values come into play. If a parent believes that nurturing her child's self confidence is of greater value than correcting his mispronunciations, she will soon find that her child speaks unintelligibly or unintelligently to others. The consequences of our values manifest themselves every time we make a value-based decision.
Nevertheless we do need to learn to make value-based judgments, and it requires that we know what our values are. Confronting a person with the rationality of the value system they have unconsciously adopted can help them change, but it isn't easy.
Analytic Processes
1. Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations.
Diagnosis is a very important skill and one that needs to be learned both in principle and in each domain of knowledge separately. Diagnosing heart disease isn't a different process in principle from diagnosing a faulty spark plug. Nevertheless a specialist is the best person to make the diagnosis in each case.
Why? Diagnosis is both a matter of reasoning from evidence and understanding what to look for to gather evidence. Given all the evidence, it is easy to make a diagnosis in an area of knowledge you don't know very well. So, the gathering of the evidence is the most important part. Crime analysts and gardeners diagnose frequently, too. They all reason from evidence. They know what constitutes important evidence.
Analytic processes involve attention to details that enable the forming of hypotheses that can be tested by a variety of methods. These three pieces—determining evidence, forming hypotheses, and testing hypotheses—is commonly referred to as the scientific method.
When science is taught, teachers often dwell on the facts of science rather than the process. Diagnosis is about the process. But the process isn't of much use without domain knowledge.
Domain knowledge is often about causality. Experts know what causes an engine to misfire so they know where to look to find a faulty part. Experts also know that an engine is misfiring in the first place. Determining the cause of something is the real issue in comprehension of any given domain.
We learn to diagnose and understand what causes what consciously. We can learn diagnosis by being taught to by an expert, but it needs to be taught as part of the process of diagnosis. If you have a goal, such as understanding what is broken or has gone awry, then it is much easier to acquire information that helps you pursue that goal than to acquire that same information without that goal.
To learn diagnostic skills, we need to practice on more and more complex cases within the area of knowledge. Then, a second area of knowledge can be added.
2. Planning: Learning to plan; needs analysis; conscious understanding of what goals are satisfied by what plans; use of conscious case-based planning.
People plan constantly. Often their plans aren't very complicated. "Let's have lunch" is a plan. Sometimes we make much more complex plans. A football coach makes plans to fool the defense ("plays"). A general makes battlefield plans. A businessman writes business plans. An architect draws up architectural plans.
All these more complex plans have a lot in common with the "let's have lunch" plan. Namely, they have been used before or something quite similar has been used before.
People rarely write plans from scratch. When they do, they find the process very difficult and often make many errors.
Learning to plan therefore has two components: being able to create a plan from scratch and being able to modify an existing plan for new purposes.
The first one is important to learn how to do, but it is the latter ability that makes one proficient at planning. Planning from first principles is actually quite difficult. Normally people just modify an old plan, such as, "Last week we had steak; this week let's try lamb chops."
This doesn't sound like rocket science, and it isn't. Computer programmers write new programs by modifying old programs. Lawyers write contacts by modifying old contracts. Doctors plan procedures by thinking about past procedures. In each case, people try to improve on prior plans by remembering where these plans went wrong and thinking about how to improve them.
Acquiring a case base of plans is critical. We can modify plans from one domain of knowledge to use in another, but it's not easy and requires a level of abstraction that is very important to learn. Most creative thinking depends on this ability to abstract plans form one field of knowledge to another. We learn by practicing.
3. Causation: Detecting what has caused a sequence of events to occur by relying on a case base of previous knowledge of similar situations (case based reasoning).
All fields of knowledge study causation; biology, physics, history, economics, they are all about what causes what. The fact that this is an object of study by academics tells us right away that it is not easy and no one knows for sure all the causes and effects that exist in the world.
Because of this, acquiring a set of known causes and effects tends to make one an expert. A plumber knows what causes sinks to stop up and knows where to look for the culprit. A mechanic knows what causes gas lines to leak and knows where to look. A detective knows what causes people to kill and knows where to start when solving a murder case.
Causal knowledge is knowledge fixed to a domain of inquiry. Experts have extensive case bases. Case bases are acquired by starting on easy cases and graduating to more complex ones. It is important to discuss the cases one works on with others because it makes one better at indexing them in one's mind enabling one to find them later as needed.
Mixed Processes
1. Influence: Understanding how others respond to your requests and recognizing consciously and unconsciously how to improve the process.
Human interaction is one of the most important skills of all. We regularly interact with family, friends, colleagues, bosses, romantic interests, professors, service personnel, and strangers. Communicating effectively is very important to any success we might want to have in any area of life, but, we do not know why we say what we say, nor do we really understand how we are being perceived by others. We just talk and listen and go on our way.
Some people are loved by everyone and others are despised. It's wrong to assume that we know what image we project or that we are easily capable of altering the way we behave so that we will be perceived differently.
How do we learn to become conscious of inherently unconscious behavior? We can learn to behave differently if we become consciously aware of the mistakes we make. Watching others, watching ourselves, thinking about how to improve-- all this helps us make subconscious behavior into conscious behavior.
We unintentionally return to standard ways of acting in various situations. A wallflower at a party doesn't decide to be a wallflower; it is simply behavior she is comfortable with. If no one is harmed by these subconscious choices, then there is no need to fix anything.
But, often we treat others in ways that, had realized what we were doing, we might not have. Getting along with people is a very big part of life. Each of us has our own distinct personalities, and they often don't match with our ambitions and desires. To change behavior, we need to practice new behaviors that become as natural to us as our old behaviors. The only way to do this is to do it. Others can point out that your actions and behaviors are not in line with your needs and desires (think of a smoker who says she wants to quit), but that does not mean you can easily change. Change only occurs through new behaviors, practiced over and over. Coaching, or practicing new behavior in front of a critique, can aid in the process. Written communication is handled the same way.
2. Teamwork: Learning how to achieve goals by using a team, consciously allocating roles, managing inputs from others, coordinating actors, and handling conflicts.
It is the rare individual who works all alone. Most people need to work with others. Children, who have to be taught to "share," are not naturally good at teamwork. Sometimes, as a work-around, they will participate in "parallel play," where they play near each one another, but not together.
Getting kids to cooperate isn't easy. Usually one wants to dominate the other. There's nothing wrong with that per se. People are who they are and need to assume roles anytime they're on a team that are consistent with their personalities. One person plays quarterback and another blocks. People do not have to do the same thing in order to work together.
But they do need to get along and function as team. It's no more true of sports than the workplace. People learn to work in teams by working in teams and receiving helpful advice when a team is dysfunctional. Football coaches explicitly teach teamwork. More formal learning situations often don't, which is unfortunate. It really isn't possible to get along in the real world unless you can assume various roles in a team that fit who you are at heart.
3. Negotiation: Making a deal; negotiation/contracts.
Contracts, formal and informal, are the basis of how we function. We reach agreements in business, marriage, friendship, shopping, and at school.
Parties to those agreements have the right to complain if obligations are not met. Learning to make a contract, legal or not, is a big part of being a rational actor. To make a contract one must negotiate it. Negotiation is often seen as something only politicians and high powered business leaders do. But, actually, we negotiate with waitresses for good service and we negotiate with our children when we give them an allowance.
Learning how to negotiate can only be done by trying and learning from failures. The techniques tend to be context-independent, but, there is, of course, special knowledge about real estate and politics for example, that make one a better negotiator in each situations. Again, practice with coaching is the ideal way to learn negotiation.
4. Goals: Goal prioritization; managing internal conflicting goals; implicit, non-conscious understanding of relative importance; learned by living.
We all have goals, but which ones are more important than the others?
We know subconsciously that if there is a fire, we should try to save children before we try to save the burning building. Perhaps prioritizing human life over an inanimate structure is taught in fire safety school, but there is no human who does not implicitly understand that it. Dogs understand it!
If we want to be rich but will lose the respect of people we care about in order to be rich, we need to make a conscious determination about goal priorities. If we want to get a degree but we also want to support our family, we need to think about how to manage more than one goal that competes for our time.
Goals conflict with each other all the time both internally and externally. Not only must we deal with goal conflicts caused by our pursuit of multiple goals simultaneously, we must also deal with external goal conflicts. Children learn about these early on when they compete for use of a toy, and later for the admiration of a playmate. We compete for power, status, money, success—all external goal conflicts. Understanding how to manage goal conflicts is extremely important.
Goal prioritization can be taught again by acquisition of cases and extrapolating from prior experience.
About the Author
Roger C. Schank is one of the world's leading researchers in AI, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments. He is President and CEO of Socratic Arts, a company whose goal is to design and implement low-cost story-based learning by doing curricula in schools, universities, and corporations.
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