This must be a critical discussion to have – our assumptions about people, how they learn, and what they do with what they learn.  My work focuses on workplace learning and I see great differences in not just the approach to the design of ‘training events and materials’ but in the fundamental design principles we use to decide whether we are about ‘filling people up with the exact knowledge that we want to give them’ or providing environments where people can learn and can apply what they learn in ways that are useful to their work.

Coincidentally I was reading this blog post tonight (The Education Scientist: What’s holding education back?).  The challenge that Michael Connell describes is this:

What if education is being held back by a number of common assumptions about learning and teaching that seem completely obvious to most people but that are nonetheless completely and utterly wrong? What if these assumptions are so obvious and so deep-seated that many people aren’t even aware they are assumptions, and what if education can’t move forward until we surface these assumptions, examine them critically, and get people to revise them?

I like his proposal that, rather than feelings of engagement leading to learning, that engagement is a product of learning.  He writes:

If learning drives engagement, then we actually have to start with high-quality learning experiences if we expect to produce high-quality learning outcomes. Instead of “injecting” fun to make the learning happen, we’ll know the learning is happening when we see students engaging deeply with the subject matter itself. In this view, “fun” (or engagement) is not something one puts into the teaching so much as something one expects to see coming out of the learning.

This approach provides a way of thinking about creation of learning environments that make the learning explicit – that is, that we can see something going on for the learners, and that learners are doing something with their newly constructed or extended knowledge and skill….