Michael McMaster writes:
>" If learning is to be a generative and creative process, it cannot be
>a mere identifying and correcting of mistakes.
>I consider learning at its larger level to be a matter of exploring
>spaces of possibility rather than "learning from mistakes". In the
>field of exploration of possibility, we can't know beforehand what a
>"mistake" is. And what appears to be high quality work at the level
>of identifying mistakes might turn out to be a "mistake" when a
>larger field of possibility is explored.
>My experience with "learning from mistakes" as a fundamental approach
>to learning is that it leads to relatively mechanistic approaches
>which tend to lead to "right/wrong" conversations and the life and
>interest goes out of the learning process."
John Dewey, in exploring the concept of expertise in 1905, wrote of two
types of expertise, 'empirical' and 'experiential'. The first, which he
saw as being the commonly encountered and conventional form - is the same
as Michael's 'mechanistic approach'. It consists of eliminating error and
improving performance through repetition of a known process. This is the
notion behind the 'learning curve'. Dewey also pointed out that it is
deeply conservative and not well suited to dealing with the unexpected or
unfamiliar, except to try and eliminate them.
Dewey's 'experiential' expertise is rare and precious. It consists of
constantly reviewing and reflecting on experience, including at the deep
causative levels, and actively seeking to make useful changes in one's
circumstances, thus generating innovation as a way of coping with the
unfamiliar and of making progress.
Leont'ev's Activity Theory suggests that true learning is innovatory in
Dewey's 'experiential' sense in that it occurs when a person is confronted
by 'disturbances', by which is meant a circumstance which is novel,
unforeseen or unexpected - a deviation of some kind from, or a missing
component of, the actor's existing model. Innovative learning is CYCLIC
rather than linear because the disturbance is dealt with by devising a
strategy, implementing it, and evaluating the results. This cycle might
include considering 'mistakes' - that is solutions that did not work as
hoped - but these are only one aspect of the cyclic process, and anyway -
as Michael has said - in a novel situation what constitutes a 'mistake' is
situationally defined.
The empirical truth of Dewey and Leont'ev's model has been demonstrated in
recent years by a number of studies by Engestrom, Raetihel and others in
settings as wide as judges and office cleaners, which have shown that
while experienced 'experts' outperform 'novices' in routine and repetitive
tasks, novices typically outperform experts when new or unexpected
situations arise.
This seems to clearly show that 90 years after Dewey we still
conventionally think of learning and expertise as consisting of improving
performance in stable settings by performing predicted tasks better and
better. This will not do in conditions which are unstable and rapidly
changing, and ones in which innovation is valued. We have to shift our
cognitive model to that cyclic and reflective one of Dewey and Leont'ev
(and, of course, Argyris, Schon and Senge). Such reflective cognition is
better performed interactively in groups than it is by individuals - in
learning organisations in fact
-- Phillip Capper WEB Research Wellington New Zealand