A teacher at my daughter's new high school shared a pearl this week: when kids are trying to learn something, he said, "Don't steal their struggle." As a parent who too frequently acts the kleptomaniac when her kid hesitates with an answer, this struck me to the core. My urge to help is so unhelpful, and this comment really brought it home to me.
So this was top of mind today in my dialogues today with staff. Ever ready to weigh in (... well, I do keep a blog...), my acting on that impulse is probably none too helpful when someone is working to understand something. Another person really can't help you understand. Wrapping your mind around new data requires something like a dialectical struggle. It's not comfortable and sometimes it feels almost physically painful - the hope is that you learn something because of the conflict between what you thought you knew and the new information.
I think this is the crucial difference between memorization and learning. We commit lots of new information to memory every day, and it's not confronting in the least -- where you left your car keys; how to do a new task; the name of the person who sits next to you at an event. This is no different in kind than memorizing the periodic table, or the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Memorization doesn't require that you change how you think about anything - it's just a mechanism to stuff more data into the matrix of your brain.
Too much workplace training is just memorization. Too much of what we 'learn' in our daily lives amounts to no more than this: we just add data to the existing constructs. As an undergraduate years ago, I naively was amazed at the drop-out rate in my freshman philosophy course. For some students, challenging the way they thought (about anything) was just too much -- enticing to me, others found it repulsive. Based on what I see, there's probably a fairly large subset of our population that refuses to challenge their preconceptions -- they'll take on new data, but anything that doesn't fit existing constructs is just lost on them. However we all have our limits: there's a point where my ability to conceptualize something like string theory just causes a system freeze.
Thankfully, it's not all that challenging. Many of the questions I hear daily go beyond memorization, but fall short of string theory. Why do we have so much inventory on hold? How can we enhance the customer's experience? How am I supposed to work with {name of least favorite coworker}? Although the person asking the question may think he's asking for information that can be acted upon, these are all learning questions. They are questions that should cause internal conflict and a change in thinking. The least helpful thing is to steal the struggle - respond with a pat answer. There's so much to be learned in challenging what you think that answer should be, and the discomfort eventually is replaced by the joy of having learned something new.
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