What is obvious and memorable about your learning?

A recent brain dump on my relationship with the word ‘mastery’ prompted some more reflection on knowledge, learning, and ignorance, mixed in with thinking about memory that was energised by something one of my coaching clients (I prefer the word partner) said to me.  As usual I let connections between these reflections form as I write and encourage your interest in them, whether you experience the flow of the narrative as smooth or turbulent.  I am going to start with a word. Obviously.

‘Obviously’ is something that connects my time as a teaching academic and my more recent time as a coach.  It relates to something I experienced as victim and perpetrator.  It’s about the toxicity of being dismissive of another person’s knowledge and ability when providing feedback to them.  When explaining something to another person how often do, we find ourselves using the word saying ‘obviously’?  Perhaps it pops up at the beginning of the sentence, although some prefer to use it at the end, almost like punctuation; obviously!

I remember being fairly new in my role in university and looking to learn from more experienced academics about how to help my students improve their understanding.  There was much to learn from positive role models, yet there was a good deal to be gained from watching bad practice and avoiding it.  I remember a couple of colleagues being serial ‘obviously’ (ab)users.  They would use it in lectures and in 1-2-1 situations responding to individual queries.  In the latter instance you could see the impact of the word in the sometimes-visible withdrawal of its recipient from the conversation.  Whatever came after the word ‘obviously’ they were not inclined to hear it, so even if it had been a pearl of wisdom it fell on fallow ground.  I remember tackling colleagues about their use of ‘obviously’, taking care not to do so in front of students.  That would be disrespectful, obviously (see how irritating it is!).  Their responses fell into two broad categories.  There was the ‘oh I wasn’t aware of that.  I wonder where the habit comes from and how it impacts my students?’  Then there was ‘well it is obvious, isn’t it!’  Back then in appeared to me that this was an example of the distinction between what growth and fixed mindsets are like.

A better method for tackling this was to encourage students to respectfully challenge anyone who used the word ‘obviously’ by asking them to provide an explanation which was not obvious to them.  Coaching this behaviour had multiple benefits in building the ‘feedback muscle’ with students; helping them to take control of their own learning when they knew they were not understanding.  In addition, it held up a mirror to academics inclined to invoke ‘obviousness’ as a reason to avoid a more detailed explanation.  I remember when I found myself using the word at the start of a sentence and reflecting now I realise I was conveying one of two meanings. One was something like ‘I can’t be arsed to invest more time in your learning right now’ and the other was ‘actually, I am not sure that I can remember the detail myself, but am too worried about my status to admit that!’  Yeah, those are my thoughts on the word ‘obviously’, a word that if I had the choice would be the second one to remove from our vocabulary.  Just for information the first one would be ‘but’.

I was thinking about how ‘obviously’ plays out in coaching conversations and I think my antipathy towards using it means that I don’t.  I certainly don’t use it in my reflections as I share them back with my client.  I mean can you imagine being on the end of statements like one of the following from your coach?  ‘Obviously, I can feel your anxiety as you speak’ or ‘your discomfort in this situation comes across in your posture as well as in what you say, obviously’.  Uurrgghhh!  No, I definitely don’t do that.

I am aware my ear is attuned to picking up when clients/ coaching partners use ‘obvious(ly)’ in their own narration.  Being interested in what is obvious to them is often a way of accessing what is less obvious.

I am left with a note to self about all this.  As a coach does my awareness of the word ‘obvious’ represent a bias that means I am less receptive to other cues?  Well, it’s certainly a sort of bias.  On balance, I don’t think it has a significant negative impact as, to use the words of a wise coaching partner of some years ago ‘your open-ness in admitting you are not sure is all it takes to allow for a to shift in awareness’.

An apparently random photo perhaps?! To me it has a connection with the process of learning including meanings that are not always obvious yet which are memorable. Photo by Jeremy Hinks

A habit in educators and learners I have seen in my time in academia and as a coach is the tendency to diminish the value of learning at the early stage by those who have reached the intermediate stage; and similarly, by those reaching the senior stage while looking back towards those at the intermediate level.  I remember it happening at school too.  The benefit of getting to the second year of secondary school was to have an entire year group below you, going through the rite of passage you could now look back on with disdain!  As the third year is reached, a switch is activated that labels all second-year experiences as being beneath the lofty heights of third year status.  So it goes on, with each step up the ladder the feeling towards the immediate preceding step, and all those occupying it, being something related to disdain, even pity.  This despite having been on that very step only a matter of weeks and months before.

I recall being perplexed how some of my school friends would have such damning opinions about a person simply because they were ‘in the year below’.  I confess though a desire to fit into my own tribe did sometimes mean that I adopted the same behaviour on occasion.  More commonly, I experienced an inkling of my future in coaching through preferring to coach/ mentor those going through what I had so recently navigated.

This behaviour on moving from one academic year to the next seems to become magnified when the output of education takes the form of recognised qualifications.  By that I mean an A level student doesn’t have much time for the GCSE; university undergraduates can only muster sympathy for those in secondary education; and postgraduates find it difficult to reconcile the fact that they, in their recent past had been undergraduates. 

There is a particular aspect of this behaviour that I find damaging to learning and it is most often the fault of educators.  How many times have you heard a teacher or lecturer say something like ‘now you reached this stage of your education on XXX (insert your chosen topic) you can forget all you’ve learned up to this point as I will be sharing with you what you really need to know’?  I can remember hearing something like this on a number of occasions during my degree studies and I can recall two components of my response.  The first was a small sense of privilege of having something new and exciting being shared with me.  A more dominant feeling was being pissed off with someone, most often someone I had no reason to trust or respect at the time, being disparaging about my current knowledge and understanding.  It really annoyed me, and it took a bit of getting over before I was prepared to engage in the new learning. 

Despite my memory being occasionally selective (!) I really don’t think that I ever adopted this behaviour as a lecturer, or in any of my roles as ‘knowledge sharer’ or ‘understanding wrangler’.  I took it as my job to integrate the understanding I was trying to develop in the minds of my students with their prior learning.  Where there was similarity between old and new theories, I encouraged integration.  Where there was difference I encouraged curiosity….and integration.  In some regards I encouraged people to be interested in exploring similarity and difference in the same way they would for any of the personal protected characteristics established to support EDI.  Putting it another way, we all need to be careful with discrimination in relation to information, knowledge, and understanding, particularly those with a responsibility for the education of others.

My thinking about this has also been prompted by a comment made by one of my coaching partners in a recent conversation.  He and I were meeting for the second time and were exploring whether he favoured starting with a review of how his thinking had developed since our first conversation.  He was musing that he could not recall much from our first conversation before sharing a narrative of actions and consequences that clearly showed he had.  Even so, I asked if he would like me to summarise the key elements of our first conversation.  He agreed, so I did, as a means of getting into the business of our session.

I remember feeling that there had been an important unspoken part to our conversation.  One in which he realised the hasty untruth of not remembering much and wondered where it had come from.  I was also interested in my need to share a summary and wondered if this was fulfilling a need that I had to confirm some value had been gained from our first conversation.  It was fascinating when, sometime later in that second session, my coaching partner chose to say ‘just because I don’t remember it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist within me, or I have not been thoughtful about it’.  I was blown away by this.  So simple and so true, most particularly the part about something existing within a person’s being if they have experienced it, even if it might not be part of a memory they can recall.

My coaching partner’s observation connects back to the experience I was describing about educators sometimes inviting learners to forget everything they know about a topic as they are about to learn ‘the real truth’.  In fact, the last thing we should want a learner to do is forget what they know.  Besides, they can’t, because ‘just because I can’t remember it, does not mean it does not exist within me’.  What we all want to encourage learners to do is to integrate their newest learning, to layer it with all that has gone before.  It’s the way to more effective engagement with your learners, and the way to creating the deepest understanding.  So, if you are training people who are already experienced in a subject, stop dissing their prior learning.  Honour similarity and difference between what they know and what you are teaching them.  Be inclusive in your approach to knowledge sharing!

There is a personal development aspect to this too.  We as individuals might deny ourselves access to prior experience when we might feel it is no longer relevant to our present-day requirements.  I have done this to myself, inadvertently.

As I evolved as a coach I went through a period of accumulating a great deal of knowledge and understanding.  To make space for this I mentally boxed up my professional life experience to date and pushed it into the spare room in my mind.  Crazy really, there was more than 30 years of learning and experience boxed up in there!  Nonetheless, I justified it as ‘I am a coach now, not an academic or a medicinal chemist’.  I had the pretence that my mental space was cleared and I could now fill it with coaching learning, theoretical and experiential.  I did exactly that and for a short while I joined each coaching conversation with my mind crammed full of coaching tools and tricks.  I could almost feel the weight of them and most certainly was aware of a bias for which of them I might choose to use, before even hearing what the client had to say.

In short order I realised that my approach was wrong and I needed to enter into a coaching conversation without being primed towards this or that method of intervention.  In effect I needed to have the mindset of a novice, rather than that of an aspiring expert.  There was a short time when I started telling myself what I had learned was not helpful.  I dissed my own knowledge and experience!!  Not a particularly bright thing to do – no better in fact than someone else dissing it.

Very quickly I realised the error of my ways and reprogrammed exactly what I meant in my own mind about the importance of being a novice as a coach.  It is important to have a novice mindset in relation to thinking about your client.  They are the experts on themselves, even if they feel otherwise.  That does not mean that I need to deny myself access to my learning about the practice of coaching.  Now I have my coaching tricks and tools randomly scattered around my mental space and trust my intuition to engage with the right one…once prompted to do so by what my client is saying.  I have also unpacked all the boxes that I put in the spare room of my mind as my entire life experience can be brought to bear in my coaching, in service of my clients’ needs.  It is not that I have a clear memory of it all, yet it does exist within me.  Nice!

If you are interest in engaging in the thought provocation please do get in touch, whether you just want to respond to the blog above or if you are interested in a coaching partnership with me.