Can you teach someone how to learn?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Karen Casemier wonders: <<Can you teach someone how to learn?>>

There's an old joke that "you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make
the damn plant think". <ahem> In theory, one of the goals of the educational
system is to teach students to learn, and you can judge the success of this
theory's implementation by the people who surround you. Some have learned
how to teach themselves new things very well indeed, whereas others seem
resistant to the whole notion of learning something new. On good days, I
believe the latter are in the minority.

<<Specifically, can you teach someone how to learn a product so well he or
she becomes an expert?>>

Of course. After all, nobody is born expert in a system; everyone must learn
it for the first time. The real question should probably be how best to
teach people so they become experts within an acceptable time period. The
answer rapidly devolves into a heated debate about the relative merits of
various educational approaches. I won't get into that other than to say that
in my experience, different people follow different approaches to learning
and picking the wrong approach for an individual makes it hard to
successfully teach them anything. (That's my subtle way of saying that those
who advocate a single pedagogical approach for all situations are nutcases.
<g>)

<<I wish I knew how to teach this skill so if we ever bring a new writer in,
I can get them moving in the right direction. But I have no idea how to do
it.>>

The solution is the same in any teaching situation, but how you reach that
solution varies enormously. You must motivate the student to learn (consider
the relative merits of the carrot and the stick), identify obstacles to
learning so you can remove them or circumnavigate them, and pick a strategy
that works best for each individual student. Then, set a learning schedule
that accomodates the learner's ability to absorb new information (to avoid
overload from too-fast learning and boredom from too-slow learning). No one
recipe works for everyone.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html
"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is
noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience,
which is the bitterest."--Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478
BCE)

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