Thinking about Knowing
Effective teaching and learning
The best/worst class I took in high school was Theory of Knowledge (ToK). Our world-weary teacher tried his best to “provide an opportunity for students to reflect on the nature of knowledge, and on how we know what we claim to know”.
High-falutin Theory of Knowledge comes up at work when I stumble over things I thought I knew or what I thought other people knew. We each have models in our minds – models of our customers, our software, our teams, and our business. Some models are good and helpful while others are misguided. How do we share the good models? Imagine if the experts could effortlessly transmit their mental models. We’d be unstoppable!
A few years ago I spoke about the topic of knowledge transfer and skill acquisition at one of ActiveCampaign's Brown Bag Session. I’m a tourist in the field of pedagogy, but I can point you towards my sources:
- What Everyone in Tech Should Know About Teaching and Learning is a video Benjamin Doherty brought to my attention. It's an engaging and fast-moving overview of effective teaching and learning.
- Weien Wang pointed me towards a summary of Accelerated Expertise. The book came from the Defense Science and Technology Advisory Group (DSTAG) as they tried to accelerate skill acquisition. The secret is simulations!