Self-Directed Learner - the Three Pillar Model of Self-Directedness

The Three Pillar Model for Developing Self-Directedness

Jennifer Gavriel

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781785230080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoria, pratica e riferimenti medici

Self-directed learning is perhaps the Holy Grail of adult learning and for good reason. Within this seemingly simple phrase lies the battleground for the frustrations of both educator and learner as they work through the difficulties of an unequal and sometimes intense partnership

CHAPTER 1

A model for self-directedness

‘We’ve got this saying, “performance by the aggregation of marginal gains”. It means taking the 1% from everything you do; finding a 1% margin for improvement in everything you do.’¹

Sir David Brailsford

INTRODUCTION

Educating others is fundamental to individual and societal improvement; it has to rank as one of the most, if not the most, important of trades. To paraphrase Dewey,² while DNA provides the mechanism for the continuation of biology, education is the mechanism for the continuation of society. We, as a human race, have reached our advanced stage of societal development because educators at all stages of learning have provided the mechanism for society to improve and achieve. Yet, still, we are not perfect and so the next generation of educators (that’s us) steps forward to use our expertise to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable our learners to move medicine and healthcare forwards.

With the importance of the role of the educator in mind, when we become educators we accept a responsibility to strive for excellence. Though medical education is often altruistic in nature, we must constantly seek to improve our practice and in doing so improve the outcomes for our learners individually and as part of a forward-moving community. The community we are educating in is not the one in which our learners will be working. In reality the healthcare community is constantly evolving and will become increasingly unrecognisable to those who worked in healthcare 50 years ago and difficult to imagine for those of us here today. Health Education England predicts ‘A significant part of the workforce in 2030 will find themselves working flexibly across specialisms and care settings in roles and places of work largely unfamiliar to the workforce today.’³ (p. 6) Most of us can probably see this coming, but predicting what the outcome will really look like in the final draft is beyond my powers.

hTis constant progression is not unique to healthcare and many organisations today, the National Health Service (NHS) included, strive to be ‘learning organisations’. These are organisations that seek to facilitate the learning of their employees and are open and willing to learn and change at an organisational level.

It is against this background that we begin to see the importance of the self-directed learner. We work in a community where standing still is going backwards; therefore we need workers with a desire to learn and the ability to do so without direct supervision. As educators we cannot simply assume that self-directed learning is pre-programmed into all learners; instead we must put in place mechanisms to develop the skills, motivations and self-belief for our learners to become self-directed both in the immediate learning experience and throughout the rest of their career.

Self-directed learning is perhaps the Holy Grail of adult learning and for good reason. Within this seemingly simple phrase lies the battleground for the frustrations of both educator and learner as they work through the difficulties of an unequal and sometimes intense partnership. The busy educator needs to guide the learner successfully through their learning with the knowledge that the best long-term outcome is a self-directed learner. Working against this is the knowledge that, in the short term, it is quicker and easier to tell them the answer. Meanwhile, the busy learner is under pressure from all sides and wants the answer handed to them with a minimum of fuss. It seems to me, as someone who has taught teenagers as well as adults, that the latter tend to revert to the former when they take on the ‘learner’ label. Think about the last time you went on a course. What did you look at when you received the schedule for the day? You probably glanced down the lectures or workshops, but did your eye linger longer on the timings of the breaks? Did you find yourself thinking about what might be laid on for lunch given the chosen venue? Did you look at the end time and wonder if you could get home earlier than usual? If not, congratulations; you are truly a very focused individual, but you are the exception. Keeping in mind that even the best of us are not always as focused as we perhaps should be will help dissipate the mounting frustrations of working with adult learners who seem to have a Peter Pan approach to learning and just will not act like adults.

‘Self-directed learning’ has been circulating as a buzz phrase in education for many decades now. The past few decades have seen increasing interest in the idea of learning organisations, career-long professional development and lifelong education. Accreditations such as ‘Investors in People’ are evidence of the focus on continual development for many businesses. As part of this progress the self-directed movement has grown and now finds itself if rmly embedded in many adult learning contexts. So it seems self-directed learning is here to stay as one of the most important aspects, if not the most important, of adult education. After all, to steal from an old proverb: ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ If we want our learner to continue drinking from the educational well (sorry, may have taken the old adage a step too far there) after their formal education, we must find a way to instil in them a high level of self-directedness. Obvious, I think, yes. Easy, most definitely, no. After many decades of work the magic bullet to create self-directedness continues to elude researchers in adult education. Most probably because there is no magic bullet, no quick fix. Sorry. hTe development of self-directedness is a complex beast. Individual psyches, varying intellects and personal motivations are all bundled up to create our learners, making each and every one of them unique and therefore the mechanism to promote self-directedness in them equally unique.

THE THREE PILLAR MODEL OF SELF-DIRECTEDNESS

If self-directedness is our cake, the raw ingredient is our learner. As adult educators we have to ‘bake’ our learner to make them self-irected, and in order to do this we need a recipe. OK, so I may be forcing the analogy somewhat but stick with it. In this chapter we will construct a model that provides us with a recipe, a system for considering what we need to put into place to develop self-directed learners.

This model is built upon research from many relevant fields combined with half a cup of experience and a pinch of common sense (definitely pushing the analogy now, sorry). It is fundamentally based upon the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’: any single action or change in methodology is unlikely to have a significant impact upon the learner’s self-directedness, but taken together the right combination of factors will add up to substantial change.

In this model, the ultimate aim – self-directedness – is a block held up by three pillars, each of which is necessary for successful self-directedness (see Figure 1.1).

● Skills – learners must have the skills necessary to complete the learning process and insight into their own strengths and weaknesses in relation to these skills.

● Motivation – learners need motivating in order to complete the tasks associated with their formal learning; they also need to develop an understanding of their own personal motivations to ensure they can continue to be self-directed in future situations.

● Self-belief – learners have to believe that they are capable of completing the task successfully.

Each of these pillars is necessary to support the characteristic of self-directedness; remove one of the pillars and self-directedness will fall down. We will discuss each of these pillars in more detail soon, but first we will look more closely at how the self-directedness block is supported by the three pillars.

FIGURE 1.1 A three-pillar model of self-directedness

Self-directedness

The fundamental concept of the three pillar structure is that the learner will need each of these pillars in place if they are to successfully become self-directed. If one (or two) is missing they are unlikely to develop a self-directed approach to their learning.

Without the Skills Pillar

If the learner has the motivation and a high level of belief that they are capable of completing the task but lacks the skills required to successfully negotiate the learning process, they will probably make an attempt at the task. However, without the skills they are likely to fail, or at least only succeed at a superficial level; this will impact upon their self-belief and likely damage internal motivating factors.

Without the Motivation Pillar

If the learner has the skills combined w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• About the author
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 A model for self-directedness
• 2 Self-directedness and adult learning
• 3 People and places
• 4 Mentoring and coaching
• 5 Reflective practice and action research
• 6 Learning and teaching
• 7 Leadership and management
• 8 Summary
• References
• Index