One of the reasons often cited for the continued reliance on old fashioned training methods and techniques is that this is what education looks like to most people.
Most people have only experienced learning in a classroom environment and therefore when they hear learning they immediately jump back to their memories of school classrooms.
But if we unpick this a little then we can see that school based learning serves a very different purpose to workplace learning and the two need to remain separate from each other.
In school, the objective is to learn how to structure complex sentences and essays, or calculate the area under a graph, or any other number of things with the purpose of passing an exam which we're led to believe will help us in someway in later life.
You may think the purpose of school is to pass on life skills which will benefit people throughout their lives. Unfortunately that's naive thinking. It's all about learning how to pass tests, and this is a purpose schooling is very good at.
Why schools are a good model
Spiral curriculum
From the first year in school, learners are taught based on a spiral curriculum devised by Bruner, in which they are introduced to something and then keep on circling back to it to reinforce and advance it further time and again.
In this respect learners are repeatedly practicing and revisiting and reflecting on their learning. It's essentially lots of meaningful practice.
Immediate feedback on performance
School also offers more than that. Through interacting with their teacher, either face to face or through written comments and marking, they are getting regular, daily feedback on their performance and suggestions on how to improve what they are producing in order to be more successful.
Why this approach doesn't work for workplace learning
If the purpose of going to work was to be able to answer written questions on a test, then conventional, classroom based training would be a suitable response.
But it's not is it? The purpose of going to work is to create, produce, design, refine, coordinate, sell, manage, and ultimately perform tasks which help the company make money.
So whilst training and teaching may be a suitable intervention in school, it's well off the pace in the world of work.
For this we need something very different.
Comments
I believe that one of the conditions for progressive and successful education is the constant improvement of teachers' qualifications. They should learn the ability to adapt and find the necessary information or help. I, for example, buy a letter of recommendation. They know all the nuances and requirements, so they write the perfect personal statement about residence, which will make you stand out from the crowd.