Reviewing learning
Looking back over an experience to identify what lessons were learned and how they might be applied.
Whether we recognise it or not, people are learning all the time by putting two and two together, reaching conclusions and modifying their behaviour accordingly. Usually what is learned is unacknowledged and unexplored. It is just left to individuals to learn intuitively by some process of osmosis with no check on what has been learned, its relevance or quality. This is unfortunate for two reasons. Firstly, 'private' learning which isn't promulgated cannot have widespread benefits. It would mean that each individual would have to learn everything first hand instead of learning from other people's shared experiences. Secondly, it is as easy for people to learn the 'wrong' things as it is to learn the 'right' things (see Rewarding the 'right' behaviours) and private learning isn't amenable to scrutiny. Learning reviews overcome these shortcomings by providing opportunities to hold things up to the light and communicate what has been learned.
The most straightforward learning review is where you ask someone what he/she has learned from a recent experience or incident (see Asking questions) and tease out their conclusions and help them to decide what they are going to do better or differently in future. It is easier to surface and make explicit what has been learned when people adopt the discipline of keeping learning logs (see Keeping learning logs).
A more ambitious formula for learning reviews is to hold a fortnightly or monthly meeting where a group of colleagues gather together for a communal review. Each contributor is asked to come to the review with three pieces of information:
- a recent experience, good or bad, planned or unplanned, they have had at work
- their conclusions or lessons learned
- their plan to do something better/differently in the light of the conclusions.
The meeting gives an equal amount of air time to each participant and in particular challenges any 'crooked' thinking and tendencies to jump to erroneous or unsubstantiated conclusions. The end result of the review is that each participant has a clear action plan to implement in the interim period before the next learning review.
Learning reviews need not be stand alone occasions. The process of talking about what has been learned is an appropriate 'add on' to many other events that crop up in the normal course of events. A swift learning review at the end of a meeting is often the key to continually improving the effectiveness of meetings (see Meetings). Learning reviews can be incorporated into coaching sessions (see Coaching).
The whole purpose of reviewing learning is to give people an opportunity to talk about what they have learned. They are learning anyway but too often at a tacit level where the learning is left unarticulated and unshared. Talking about learning makes it explicit and brings added value not least because people can learn so much from each other.