Three Aspects of Learning: Building Skills, Applying Knowledge, Transferring Knowledge

Each of these three activities requires a different skill set. I began my professional teaching career at the age of 17 as a volunteer water safety instructor with the American Red Cross. Their training gave me some insight into these three aspects of learning.

My first exposure to the American Red Cross water safety program was when I graduated from high school and had to pass the American Red Cross test to be certified as a life guard. I could swim and took the American Red Cross lifesaving course and passed the test. One of the instructors spoke to me at the end of the course and invited me to become a water safety instructor—then I would be teaching the course and be one of the testers rather than someone trying to pass the test. I thought that was a great idea and became a water safety instructor, building my own swimming skills in the nine styles of swimming as well as skills in all aspects of life saving.

Once I had developed my own skills and had completed the training to be an instructor, I could apply my knowledge as a coach and a trainer. I knew what to look for when someone was learning to swim or to be a lifeguard and could coach them to improve. I knew to break down the swimming strokes to their components, improve the components, then put the entire stroke back together again in an improved swimming style. This was an entirely new set of skills beyond those of the person learning how to swim well.

After I had been an instructor for some time, I was invited to become an Instructor Trainer. This, too, involved developing an entirely new set of skills. I could perform and coach and now I had to learn how to assist someone else to develop the instructor (coaching) ability and to make sure that their performance as an instructor matched the standards established by the American Red Cross. Water Safety Instructors teach children and adults and need to know how to work well with both groups. I repeated this entire learning process when I also became an American Red Cross First Aid, then CPR instructor and instructor-trainer. I was a volunteer instructor for the Red Cross for 33 years and what I learned as a volunteer led me to pursue a doctorate degree in education and has helped me in my consulting and teaching careers.

The “Learning Target Matrix” and the “Personal Performance Change Curve” (see http://joelmonty.wikispaces.com/file/view/Meta-Learning+Models.PDF [pages 7 and 8) describe some of what goes on in the skill and knowledge building process. It is important to remember that, depending on the target outcomes—skill building, applying knowledge, or transferring knowledge--these will need to be repeated tree times, each time focused on one of the three levels.

The American Red Cross makes a distinction for each of these three levels and I believe that, in most cases, that distinction needs to be followed to avoid confusion and a desire to “oversimplify” or to skip something that is really an essential piece of skill or knowledge.

Another aspect of this understanding of learning (and included on the “Personal Performance Change Curve”) is the concept of conscious and unconscious competence. We may become skilled swimmers, not thinking about what we are doing in the water, just swimming wonderfully well. We may be wonderful coaches to help others develop swimming skills, not realizing what we are doing and intervening at just the right time and in just the right way to make a difference. We may be wonderful facilitators and instructor-trainers, intervening in just the right times and ways to bring out the coaching skills of the people coming to us to learn. To achieve the unconscious competence in each level at some point we had to be conscious and to think about what we were doing. We need to break things down and to slow down again as we learn to step what we are doing up to a new level. Knowledge transfer is considered one of the highest levels of learning support for a reason. It requires lots of scaffolding and experience to do it well.