Ignorance, education and maturity

I was once a kid, being ignorant of small things.  Then I got educated.  Now I am mature, having raised my ignorance to higher planes and becoming ignorant of the big things.  – JJ

Eleanor Roosevelt on education

People like Eleanor Roosevelt teach us what it means to live a full life.   Given below is an excerpt from her book “You Learn by Liv­ing: Eleven Keys for a More Ful­fill­ing Life.”

What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important in­gre­di­ents in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the ad­ven­ture of life. You will find no courses in which these are taught; and yet they are the qual­i­ties that make all learning reward­ing, that make all life zest­ful, that make us seek con­stant­ly for new ex­pe­ri­ence and deep­er un­der­stand­ing. They are also the qual­i­ties that en­able us to con­tin­ue to grow as human be­ings to the last day of our life, and to con­tin­ue to learn.

By learn­ing, of course, I mean a great deal more than so-called for­mal ed­u­ca­tion. No­body can learn all he needs to know. Ed­u­ca­tion pro­vides the nec­es­sary tools, equip­ment by which we learn how to learn. The ob­ject of all our ed­u­ca­tion and all the de­vel­op­ment which is a part of ed­u­ca­tion is to give every one of us an in­stru­ment which we can use to ac­quire in­for­ma­tion at any time we need it.

Such beautiful, powerful words they are: “… the most important in­gre­di­ents in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the ad­ven­ture of life.”

Are schools useful?

A quote by Sugata Mitra: “It’s quite fashionable to say that the education system’s broken — it’s not broken, it’s wonderfully constructed. It’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.” http://www.ted.com/speakers/sugata_mitra.html

I tend to agree with the above observation (somewhat!).  Yes, the system is outdated, but we still need it, because between the class-hours there are breaks!

Commentary on "The Power of Pull"

Commentary on “The Power of Pull” by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison; Published by Basic Books, 2010.

Page 11:  Quote begins: < It used to be that we could rely on “stocks”of knowledge – what we know at any point in time – but these stocks are diminishing in value more rapidly than ever before.  …. In more stable times, we could sit back and relax once we had learned something valuable, secure that we could generate value from that knowledge for an indefinite period. Not anymore.  To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant “flows”of knowledge – interactions that create knowledge or transfer it across individuals. > Quote ends.

What is the significance of this observation for our approach to education and training? Perhaps we must make a conscious effort to give much more emphasis on collaboration skills.  The current paradigm of education limits the opportunities for collaboration, with only an occasional team project or sports activity giving such opportunities.  For almost the entire four years of engineering education at the undergraduate level, a student goes about studying one subject after another to pass exams.  The good student is expected to listen to lectures, read textbooks, submit assignments (mostly individual assignments) and reproduce what he knows in a series of examinations.  They are all tests of “knowledge stocks”.  Hardly anyone bothers about the process of knowing, which is valuable for a lifetime.

Could we have a paradigm, where collaboration skills are given at least as much importance as individual knowledge stocks?  What would be the challenges in moving towards such a paradigm?

Perhaps, the paradigm shift is difficult because we are all conditioned to believe that one succeeds only through individual merit.  And we believe that a series of exams or assessments is the best way to measure such individual merit.  The belief is further reinforced  by corporate cultures that boast about meritocracy.  Meritocracy often becomes a euphemism for rat-race.  Thus, it is hard for us to un-condition ourselves and start looking at the possibility of success through collective merit.  But this is an alternative worth considering and experimenting with.

A new system of examination

It would be great if exams at schools and colleges changed from “teachers asking questions to students” to “students asking questions to teachers.”

If the students are able to ask relevant questions, that would be an indicator of their learning.  To be able to ask good questions, it is not enough for the students to be intelligent; they should have applied their intelligence to the subject of study.  They should have spent some time really understanding the subject.

In this system of examination, each student would be given the opportunity to ask a fixed number of questions, say, 10 questions.  Certain guidelines would be given to define the broad boundaries of the topics being examined.

For each questioning opportunity, the student would be graded on a scale of zero to thee, based on the following guidelines:

Zero mark  — No question asked using the opportunity.

One mark  — Question can be answered by merely reproducing content given in the prescribed textbooks.

Two marks  — Question can be answered by critically examining the content given in the prescribed textbooks.

Three marks — Question can be answered by extending (going beyond) the content given in the prescribed textbooks, along with a critical examination of the same.

Melinda Gates on education

From an article by Melinda Gates:

“Never before has this country had such an opportunity to remake the way we teach young people. One reason I am so optimistic about these developments is because, after decades of diffuse reform efforts, they all zero in on the most important ingredient of a great education: effective teachers. The key to helping students learn is making sure that every child has an effective teacher every single year.”

Title of article:   Education reform, one classroom at a time

By Melinda French Gates

Source: The Washington Post, February 19, 2010,  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021802919.html

My reflections:

Anyone who has a child in school realizes the importance of focusing on great teachers.  I have two kids going to a small school at Trivandrum.  Luckily, they love their school and teachers.  But they have a long way to go to complete their schooling, and I hope they will continue to get good teachers.

It is nice to see that there is a renewed understanding about the importance of getting the priorities right in educational reforms. Some signs are there in India too, but it is still too dim.  We really need to focus on the teachers.  Teaching, after all, is a process of interaction between human beings.

The Intangibles in the Educational System

Look at a One thousand Rupee currency note.  It is very valuable.  Now what if, by some error, the reverse of this note showed the image of a Ten Rupee currency note?  Certainly, the whole note loses value.   The point is that to be of any value, both sides of the currency note should indicate the same denomination.

Now come to what we see in an educational institution.  We mostly see the front end – the tangibles. I consider Curriculum, Content and Infrastructure as the tangible components of an educational system.  These are important, but not sufficient to form a vibrant, effective educational institution.  In building and nurturing educational institutions, we must pay a lot more attention to the intangibles.  We shall broadly call it as the culture of our educational institutions.

Culture has an all-pervasive character within any organizational system.  It is mostly intangible, but its quality is felt by its effect.  It is like the air that we breath.  We don’t notice it most of the time, but the quality of air, humidity level etc. has an impact on our state of well-being on a daily basis.  We exist in our culture, just as a fish lives in water, without much conscious awareness of its presence.  Though culture is mostly intangible, it is expressed visibly in behavioural patterns, stories that we tell and the quality of the artefacts that we create.

Within the educational system, culture is mostly expressed in the pedagogic system, teaching styles, leadership & management styles, and the ways in which teachers and students interact among themselves and with each other.

While establishing and nurturing educational institutions, a lot more attention needs to be paid to these intangible aspects.  Quite often, most of the attention goes towards developing curriculum and setting up infrastructural facilities such as buildings and laboratories.  In most cases, the website and prospectus of educational institutions talk about their course curricula and infrastructure.  How many of them mention their unique pedagogic approaches?

A healthy culture in educational institutions is characterized by the following attributes:

1. Focus on high performance in academics and research.
2. Knowledge is generated through dialogue, and continuously fed back into the system for creating new insights.
3. Power derived mostly from expertise, rather than designations and position in the hierarchy.
4. Constant feedback from all stakeholders, with the feedback data used for continuous improvement.
5. Students have clarity of performance expectations, and receive accurate and prompt feedback about their performance.
6. Individual attention, even when the time available for individual meetings is constrained by schedule pressure and large batch sizes.

Organizations responsible for standard setting and accreditation, such as AICTE and NAAC in India, are too steeped in tradition to develop competencies for measuring and giving feedback on the intangible aspects.  Industry bodies such as CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM could play a vital role in sensitizing educational institutions about the importance of the intangibles.

On education

Education is the process of meaningfully addressing curiosity.

—  JJ’s last reflection for the day.

Giving and receiving feedback for performance improvement

Core Idea: Feedback is perhaps the most important process that we have for improving performance – our own, and that of our team members.  Skills in giving and receiving feedback are indispensable for every manager, leader, educator and parent.

How do scientists at ISRO or NASA put a satellite in its correct orbit and orient it with such precision?  How does a missile intercept moving targets in mid-air?  These feats of high performance become possible through a system of sophisticated feedback control.

Why do some organisms survive and thrive, while others perish and become extinct?  Again we see that feedback systems are in operation in nature.  Some organisms receive feedback from the environment and develop the needed abilities to adapt.  They survive.  Others do not take feedback or are too slow to react to the environmental changes.  They perish.

We see companies which are in constant touch with the market and their customers.  They adpat quickly to changes in the economic, political, legal, social and demographic environment.  They track changing customer preferences.  They are in constant dialogue internally and externally to give and receive feedback.  Such organizations thrive.

Some companies cut themselves off from the environment.  They sink in their own brew.

The same is the case with teams as well. Teams (as well as departments in organizations) which are constantly in touch with other teams and operate as part of feedback loops perform much better than others which are too internally focused.  Many teams comprising of bright individuals, who also work in harmony with each other, fail because they lack the constant dialogue with those outside the team – their customers and other stakeholders.  (This is an idea expressed very forcefully in a book that I am currently reading – “X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed Teams” by Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman.)

What about individuals?  How important is feedback for their performance and personal development?  No doubt, we agree that it is absolutely important.  Without feedback, individuals stagnate.

Recall the basic concepts that we might have learnt through the famous Johari Window.  There are a few things about us, which we know and others know.   Then there are a few things that we know about ourselves,  but others do not know.  We were too shy to share them with others, out of a sense of modesty or shame.  If these are things that others should know, we better tell them.  There are also a few things that others know about us, but we may not be aware of.  They might never have told us, and we never bothered to ask if they had something to tell us.  This quadrant offers high potential for personal growth and development.  By being willing to seek feedback and listen without defence, we get valuable insights about ourselves – both our strenghts and areas for improvement.

There are also aspects of our personality that are still unknown to us as well as others.  They remain in the mystery of the unconscious.  I am not going to deal with this quadrant right now.  I may just hint that we get to know our unconscious by a variety of means such as paying attention to our dreams, observing our mood swings, taking note of something that we say or do without much thought and by observing other people’s reaction to our words and body language.

Coming back to the subject of feedback it would be useful to keep in mind a few guidelines for giving and receiving feedback.  The following guidelines would help us to give feedback more effectively:

1. Describe your observations, rather than pass judgements about intentions or motivations behind the behaviour.
2. Point out specific instances of behaviour, rather than generalize across different behaviours.  By being specific about your observation, you ensure that subjectivity is minimized in the feedback process.  You also do not leave too many things to the imagination of the receiver.  Giving generalized feedback may be easier for you, but it leaves the receiver wondering what it is that he or she has to correct.
3. Separate feedback from advice and suggestions.
4. Give feedback only if you are genuinely interested in a behavioural change in the receiver of the feedback.  This may be because you love the person (as in a family relationship) or you expect improvements in product or service quality (as in a customer-supplier relationship).  Whatever the case may be, avoid giving feedback only to show how powerful you are, or how much better off you are than the other person. Feedback should never be an ego trip.
5. Refrain from giving feedback if there is hardly anything that the receiver can do about it.
6. Ensure that you build trust and convey respect by expressing gratitude and giving feedback about things that you appreciate.  Do not limit the power of feedback by using it only for correction of undesirable behaviour.
7. Word negatives as areas for improvement.  But do not camouflage it as positives and leave the receiver confused.
8. Give feedback at the earliest appropriate occasion.
9. Chek to ensure that the receiver of the feedback has clearly understood what you wanted to convey.

Receiving feedback is harder than giving feedback.  But there is nothing that is as useful as honest feedback when it comes to your own personal development.  We must count ourselves as lucky if we are in the company of people who give us feedback on a regular basis.  If we are not that lucky, we must take the initiative to ask for feedback.  We can ask for feedback from different people – our family members, friends, colleagues, customers, suppliers, teachers etc.  Taking feedback and acting on them is one of the most effective ways of improving our performance and developing our capabilities to higher levels.

The following guidelines would be useful in receiving feedback:

1. Withhold judgement, until you have got all that the person giving feedback wants to tell you. If the feedback comes to you in a conversation, ensure that you apply all the skills of being a good listener.  Be willing to listen, and also demonstrate your willingness through appropriate body language. If the communication is in writing, read carefully, looking not only for the factual content, but also the emotions behind what is expressed in writing.
2. Ask questions for clarification without becoming defensive.  Ask for additional data if required; but do so politely.
3. There is hardly any point in telling the giver of feedback how wrong he or she is.  If you honestly feel that you are right, and that the person giving the feedback has misunderstood you, of course you need to make it clear to him or her.  But wait until you have listened to the whole story.  Then take a few minutes to compose yourself.  Respond without aggression or excessive modesty.
4. Do not brood over negative feedback.  Take it and process it rationally, segregating the more important points from the less important ones.  This type of a ‘thinking approach’ helps you to retain perspective and prevents over-correction.
5. Do not belittle yourself by recounting the negative feedback given by others.  It is for you to act on, not for public confession.
6. Develop some understanding about various psychological defence mechanisms that come in the way of receiving feedback.  These are behaviours such as aggression, withdrawal, denial, displacement, rationalization, suppression, sublimation, projection etc.  We need not be professional psychologists, but we all need to constantly work on increasing our self awareness.  We must identify our recurrent patterns of defence.  This will help us to get out from our own unhealthy behavioural traps.
7. Develop a network of development partners (trusted friends and family members), who are interested in your welfare.  Ask them for their honest feedback.  When you receive feedback, which you are not sure about, verify with your trusted partner.

Feedback is a communication process, and so it can suffer from all the common problems in communication.  Constantly work on improving your communication skill to be effective in giving and receiving feedback.

Learning as Creative Design

How can we transform learning into an experience of joy and free flow of energy?  How can we help learners to rise from the depths of drudgery into the realms of creative expression?  How can learning become fun rather than imposition?

These are questions that thoughtful teachers, parents, managers, counsellors, educators and leaders ask themselves.

What is drudgery? It is the state where no learning is taking place. Drudgery is monotonous repetition.

There is no life without some amount of drudgery.  Life demands repetition of already mastered tasks. Even those creative artists, sportsmen and entrepreneurs are not free from this.   Attempts to escape drudgery by avoidance of one’s daily duties will lead to neurosis in the long run. What then is the way out of drudgery? The answer lies in finding opportunities to re-create.

Learning becomes a burden when the learner is expected only to reproduce what is taught, rather than re-create what he has learned. Why do so many students dread the drudgery of schools and colleges?  Because all that is expected from them would be to faithfully reproduce facts, figures and formulae (information) in one examination after another. Where is the joy? Where is the scope for creativity and thinking out of the box?

Drudgery is cured by re-creation. Re-creation is creative expression. It is not re-arrangement; it is thoughtful re-design. It is a basic human need, which is given scant attention in educational psychology.  Learning becomes freed from monotony when learners re-create and re-design. Effective learning is a joyful experience, because it is a design process.