In our last post, we explored the key distinction between active engagement and guided learning: discovery versus instruction. These different approaches significantly reprogram how individuals understand, process, perceive and apply information. Active engagement helps learners develop the ability to discover insights into problems which is often lacking in guided learning.
Challenges of Skill Development in Guided Learning
Have you ever attended a course that promised to equip you with life-changing skills and knowledge? How often, after completing a personal development class or business workshop, have you successfully applied the learned knowledge, observed skill improvement and felt that the investment was worthwhile?
While these classes often include practice sessions to help participants build hands-on skills, the reality is that many struggle with what educational theorists call the “transfer of learning” problem – where skills and knowledge learned in one specific context fail to generalize to real-world situations.
To understand why it is difficult to develop advanced and transferrable skills in guided learning, we first need to explore the nature of guided learning itself. Knowledge in guided learning is often pre-digested and presented in bite-sized pieces. Instructors tend to provide learners with explicit instructions and support throughout the learning process, leaving little room for flexibility or independent exploration.
This method is designed to ensure that learners absorb information systematically and acquire foundational knowledge with clarity and precision. Students often have to act on given information and understanding is often measured by their ability to reproduce it accurately. Because of this, practice sessions don’t always capture the complexity and unpredictability of real-life situations.
For instance, a trading course might teach the perfect theoretical strategies and provide practice sessions with ideal conditions, creating an illusion of guaranteed success. This is similar to playing chess and always relying on a single checkmate pattern to take the king, while expecting your opponent to always make the same moves, without learning the other essential strategies that lead to that very moment.
Guided learning frequently reduces complex skills to formulaic steps or checklist approaches, providing a clearly defined path to ensure that learners are not left to figure things out on their own. As a result, skill development and knowledge acquisition are often limited to confirming existing knowledge, neglecting the exploration of how these concepts interact within complex real-world scenarios. This significantly limits the applicability of learned knowledge and skills to real-world scenarios.
Truth is: Effective skill mastery requires more than just receiving information, it requires the flexibility to apply knowledge in a variety of situations. Guided learning tends to create a misleading perception of one’s abilities, fundamentally reshaping an individual’s interaction with knowledge, challenges, themselves and their intellectual capabilities. Far beyond surface-level skill limitations, this approach can inflict deep, often invisible wounds on a learner’s intellectual identity.
While active engagement is a vital component in developing lifelong learning, it is not the sole determinant of whether an individual will develop lifelong learning successfully. Interested to find out the other essential factors for developing lifelong learning? Like and follow for part 3.
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