Helping People Learn to Learn: Innovating Educational Systems

We have been talking about learning to learn for decades.

Research on metacognition, learner autonomy and lifelong learning has established its importance. Education systems are also evolving to respond to changing skills and market needs.

So, this is not about introducing a new idea.

It is about asking a different question:

Have we designed our education systems
to systematically help people become better at learning?

Much of our effort has gone into making education more relevant to a changing world. 

Curricula are updated, new skills are introduced and people are encouraged to reskill or recertify.

But if the world keeps changing as rapidly as we know it has in recent times, how long can we keep updating what people need to know?

Perhaps we should also make learners more capable of adapting to a changing world.

That means developing learning competency: the ability to identify what they need to learn, seek and comprehend relevant knowledge, contextualise and apply it, learn from experience and adapt their approach.

Learning from experience

I have encountered a similar issue in organisations.

In performance discussions, people who had missed their targets would often be confident that they would do better in the next cycle.

Yet, when we explored what had gone wrong, they were not able to identify the real gap – what had been learned from the experience, or what would be done differently.

The issue was not necessarily commitment. It was often the ability to learn from experience.

If we cannot analyse why something did not work, identify what we need to learn and change our approach to suit the context, repeating the activity or transactionally addressing symptoms does not necessarily produce a better outcome.

This is also how I engage with my clients. Rather than simply helping them address the problem at hand, I try to help them develop the competency to understand the problem, learn from the experience and apply that learning to the next challenge. 

The objective is not just to solve today's problem, but to leave the organisation better equipped to identify and solve for tomorrow's challenges.

That competency should arguably begin much earlier than the workplace.

From learning topics to developing learning competency

What if education were designed not only to help people acquire knowledge and skills, but also to progressively develop their learning competency?

The nature of learning itself is changing.

The Internet has made access to information and knowledge dramatically easier. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now making it increasingly easier to search, synthesise, explain and work with what is already known.

As this continues, the differentiating competency may shift.

It becomes less about simply accessing knowledge and more about knowing what to seek, how to comprehend it, what is relevant to the context at hand, and how to adapt and apply it effectively.

In other words, the challenge is increasingly not just knowing what is available but knowing what to do with it.

This is also consistent with what I see in innovation. Methods and tools are increasingly available. The challenge is rarely knowing that a method exists. It is understanding when and how to apply it to the context at hand.

Could education similarly focus less on producing people who know more, and more on developing people who can learn, contextualise and apply better?

Students would still need to know things and acquire skills.

But they would also learn to:

question → explore → comprehend → contextualise → experiment → reflect → learn → adapt → apply

The subject provides the context.
The learning process develops the competency.

 

This could require some fundamental shifts:

From	Towards
Teacher delivers	Learner explores
Curriculum defines what to learn	Learner participates in defining what to learn
Correct answers	Quality of questions and reasoning
Periodic examinations	Continuous evidence of learning
Failure is penalised	Failure becomes learning information
System optimises teaching	System develops learning competency

 

Teachers would not become less important. Their role is already evolving from being primarily providers of knowledge to facilitators of learning a subject.

The opportunity proposed here is to take that evolution one step further:

From facilitating the learning of a subject
to facilitating the development of the learner's competency to learn.

That is a fundamentally different role.

Designing for a changing world

The objective would no longer be to predict exactly what people will need to know ten or twenty years from now. It would be to help them become competent at figuring it out.

Instead of asking only:

What should we teach people to prepare them for the future?

we could also ask:

How might we help people become capable of learning
what they need when the future arrives?

That could change the fundamental purpose of education:

From preparing people for the future
to preparing people to learn continuously for the future.

Perhaps the real measure of an educational system is therefore not simply how much its learners have learned. 

It is how competent they have become at learning what they need to learn next.

Could innovating educational systems to help people learn to learn be one of the most important educational innovations of all?

Those who are aligned with this thinking are welcome to collaborate.