Who Guides You?

Who in your field do you look to for inspiration and guidance? Someone asked me this the other day and it gave me pause. It’s not something I think about on a regular basis. The first name that popped into my head was John Dewey. He is well known for his philosophy of education and, although his seminal publication, Experience and Education, was published 72 years ago, Dewey’s theories and criteria for adult education (the foundation of corporate learning) are still relevant.

Take, for example, his idea that instructional strategies must take learners’ prior experience into account. He says that it’s our past experience which helps us propose new problems, apply new thoughts, and connect new learning so that it’s relevant to us today. Dewey doesn’t give instructions on how to do this, but he suggests that the best place to start when planning instruction – whether it’s online or face-to-face – is with learners’ unique experiences. “The beginning of instruction shall be made with the experience learners already have; that this experience and the capacities that have been developed during its course provide the starting point for all further learning” (p. 88).

This is easier said than done since we each have a plethora of varied life experiences to draw from. Indeed, “The field of experience is very wide and it varies in its contents from place to place and from time to time” (p. 95). How then do you begin to tap adults’ unique experiences and use them for quality, individualized learning purposes? This is perhaps easier to do in instructor-led classes. Instructional designers can incorporate activities that allow participants to reveal their personalities and bits of their past experience. Facilitators can elicit and then refer back to these experiences as they facilitate – and even tailor their instruction on-the-fly to be more relevant.

It’s more challenging in self-paced, asynchronous online training because there is no real-time feedback and sharing of experiences. One way to to tailor online instruction to participants’ experiences is to start with a thoughtful, thorough needs analysis (as you should do for any type of instruction). This will help you gain a better understanding of where participants are coming from and what’s important to them. You can then weave the results into the design of the instruction.

You can also incorporate reflection. “To reflect is to look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings which are the capital stock for intelligent dealing with further experiences. It is the heart of intellectual organization and the disciplined mind” (p. 110). Reflection in a self-paced computer-based training course might come in the form of a self-assessment. How do you incorporate learners’ prior experiences into relevant instruction? Who guides and inspires you?