NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Good Practice as a Source of Learning: What Can We Learn From Learning Theories?
By Peter Grootings, European training Foundation, Turin
KeywordsLearning Theories, Good practice
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Let me start this brief note with a strong statement: To present good practice as best practice is very bad practice. I will make a short expedition into learning theories to explain what I mean.
Many assistance projects funded and/or undertaken on behalf of international donors are characterised by policy transfer or policy copying. They are based on the assumption that at least on paper, or perhaps even somewhere in the real world, there exist ?best policy practices? that are relevant for any other country and can therefore be easily taught by and learned from international consultants, or studied and copied by national policymakers. The practices are considered ?best? because they either fit in particular theoretical or ideological constructs, or because they ?work?. However, policies based on transfer or copying of best practices have generally resulted in unsustainable policy proposals. The main reasons for this are that they did not fit in the wider context of the countries, there was no real ownership among key national stakeholders, and hence no possibility or commitment from anybody to make the policies work in practice after a funding agency would withdraw. As a result, implementation of new policies has often been catastrophic and has practically never achieved the results foreseen and hoped for. Most often these policies were not implemented at all or have produced unintended ? and unexpected ? side effects that in the end produced results similar to those that they were supposed to correct in the first place. Precious resources have been wasted and little progress has been made.
Assuming that policies can be regarded as a form of knowledge and that policy development therefore can also be understood as a process of policy learning, it appears that many traditional development approaches are rooted in a particular understanding of knowledge as something that already exists independently of the policy learners, and of learning as a process of acquiring the policy knowledge presented by someone else. These are also the basic assumptions of behaviourist and cognitivist approaches to learning that have dominated educational practice for such a long time. Instead, an alternative and perhaps more realistic, approach would at least assume that the policy learners themselves also bring valuable knowledge to the policy learning process (such as about the institutional context, history, culture, values and power relations in their country), and that new policy knowledge therefore can only be the result of active participation of policy learners in its very development. This is what constructivist approaches to learning would argue, especially when learning is about the solving of very complex and ill-structured problems, which is what policy development of course is all about. Policy learning in this sense is more likely to produce new policies that are truly owned by stakeholders who actively developed these policies themselves, and therefore have much better chances to be implemented and become sustainable.
But merely replacing policy transfer or policy copying by talking about policy learning will not per se change much as the concept of policy learning can be applied within very different approaches to learning. In reality there is always implicitly some view about learning present in all assistance activities. Indeed, it is when we are trying to make the underlying learning assumptions more explicit that much of policy development assistance appears to be rooted in an understanding of how people learn that has already lost much of its relevance to the learning theory community at large. It remains therefore astonishing how little of international assistance in education policy development in fact draws on modern theories of learning.
The point that I wish to make here is not so much that exposure to policy experiences or practice from elsewhere has no role to play at all in international assistance. That would be totally ridiculous of course. It is the way those experiences are used which really makes the difference. The use of examples is good practice in any educational or learning setting. But as in any other formal learning settings such as schools or training centres, the good practice of using examples is dependent on why, and what needs to be learned, and how it is understood that learning can best be facilitated. Just a brief reminder therefore of what the major learning theories have to say.
From a behavioural perspective the goal is to predict and control with reasonable certainty what people will do in specific situations. The objective of instruction is to develop desired behaviour through conditioning behaviour in response to external stimuli (experience) through different kinds of media. Knowledge is an individual?s repertoire of behavioural responses to stimuli from the environment from the past. Learners are seen as basically responding to external stimuli, not completely passively though as they learn by doing, experiencing, and engaging in trial and error through repetition. Learning is considered as a change in behaviour due to experience whereby the change in behaviour is the response to a stimulus event. Here, best practice is the external event and the application of best practice is the desired learning outcome. To organise the learning process so that the learner will achieve a desired change in behaviour is the main task of the teacher (or for that matter - consultant).
Cognitivists share many of the assumptions of the behaviourist approach and differ basically only in a focus on cognitive aspects as opposed to behaviourist ones. Much like behaviourism, cognitivism emphasises the role of environmental conditions in facilitating learning. Thus, explanations, demonstrations, examples of good practice can all guide learning and so do feedback and practical experience. But instead of a more or less mechanical absorption of such stimuli here the learner is thought to actively process stimuli in the mind. Memory plays an important role. Whereas the behaviourist teaching focuses on organising the environment (stimuli), the real focus of the cognitive approach is on changing the learner by encouraging the use of appropriate learning (information processing) strategies. Despite assuming a more active mental role from the side of learners, however, the cognitivist approach also shares with behaviourism the same role definition for the teacher (or consultant): transfer of existing ? best practice ? knowledge in the most effective and efficient way. Learner characteristics and differences only play a role in deciding where to start (importance of prior knowledge for giving meaning) and which particular learning strategies are to be stimulated (learner disposition and learning styles).
The implications of ?putting the mind between? stimulus and response are developed further in their consequences by constructivist approaches. These stress that knowledge is not so much acquired from others as constructed by people themselves as they try to give sense to their own experiences. More radical social constructivists insist on the importance of interaction, dialogue and negotiation with relevant others for learning. Learning is not the lonely act of an individual but a matter of being initiated into the practices of a community. Constructivist approaches see learning as a continuous ? and highly selective ? process of exchange between individuals and their ?Umwelt? through which people give their own meaning to new information. Learners learn based on what they already know and guided by how they have become accustomed to see the world around them. Learning is seen as situated in activity which is why its validity can only be assessed in terms of providing a ?viable?, workable, acceptable action relative to potential alternatives.
But as learning is social action, a person?s knowledge must constantly be communicated and negotiated with others in that community which requires continuous re-assessment, reflection and self-regulation from the learner. Meanings do not necessarily have to be fully shared but need to be broadly compatible with those of relevant others. Knowledge therefore is temporary, open to continual negotiation and memory is always under construction.
Since knowledge is constructed and cannot be transmitted, instruction should consist of experiences and practices that facilitate knowledge construction. Indeed, a central issue for constructivists is that there is no single best practice that simply needs to be learned and applied. The role of instruction and teachers (or consultants) would be to assist learners to understand how knowledge is and can be constructed, to promote collaboration with others (learners, peers, more advanced experts) in social activities, to show that multiple perspectives can be relevant for a particular issue, and to arrive at positions that they can defend and commit themselves to, while understanding that there are other views with which they can disagree. Such a role goes beyond the analysis of, and support for individual learning tasks and should be rather conceived in terms of creating a strong learning environment that enables these interrelated aspects of constructivist instruction. The teacher acts as a coach and, being a professional learning facilitator, also needs to be able to diagnose where learners are in terms of making progress towards achieving their own learning objectives, help identify which - and guide where - relevant information that could be of use for learners can be found, and assess when and how learners can eventually transfer their newly constructed knowledge to other kinds of situations and activities.
This brief excursion into the territory of learning theories may help to develop a more realistic use of good practice by international consultants in their role of facilitators of policy learning processes.
I have focused in this brief note on only one of the reasons why international assistance to policy development usually produces poor results, namely the lack of local ownership of new policies. There is a lot to be learned from ongoing learning theory discussions on the issue of ownership, even though the practical and operational dimensions of creating strong policy learning environments are still largely to be developed. Learning theories, moreover, largely focus on the learning of individuals even when they stress that individuals are learning as members of larger social communities. If there would have been enough space, I would also have discussed the second important reason for failure, which is the often total lack of embeddedness of borrowed and imported policy solutions in the contexts of the countries that should introduce these new policies. Apart from the sociological dimensions of this issue (a society is not just a collection of separate unconnected institutions that each can be changed at will), there are also learning theoretical aspects implied by the need to optimise embeddedness. These collective forms of learning also need to be better understood if assistance to policy learning wants to successfully contribute to co-constructing new policies that are not only locally owned by a small number of national policymakers but also embedded in local contexts, including the various interest groups and professional communities that exist in a country.
Notes
This note is written as a personal opinion and in no way expresses or reflects an official view of the European Training Foundation. However, several recent ETF projects have been inspired by the thinking presented here.
Further reading
Duffy, Th. M., & Cunningham, D.J. (1996). Constructivism: implications of the design and delivery of instruction. In D. Jonassen (Ed), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology (pp. 170- 195). London: Prentice Hall.
Ellerman, David (2005). Helping People Help Themselves. From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Ertmer, P.A., & Newby, T.J. (1993). Behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 6(4), 50- 71.
Fullan, Michael (2001). The new meaning of educational change. Third Edition. London: Routledge Falmer.
Grootings, Peter (Ed.) (2004) Learning Matters. ETF Yearbook 2004. Turin: European Training Foundation.
Grootings, Peter & Nielsen, Sören (Eds.) (2005) The role of teachers in VET reforms: professionals and stakeholders. ETF Yearbook 2005. Turin: European Training Foundation.
Grootings, Peter & Nielsen, Sören (Eds.) (2006) Skills development for poverty reduction. ETF Yearbook 2006. Turin: European Training Foundation.
Grootings, Peter (2007). Discussing National Qualification Frameworks. Policy Learning in Practice. In Nielsen and Nikolovska (Eds.), Quality in Vocational Education and Training: Modern Vocational Education and Training Policies and Learning Processes. ETF Yearbook 2007. Turin: European Training Foundation.
Hager, Paul (2004). The Competence Affair, or Why Vocational Education and Training Urgently Needs a New Understanding of Learning. Journal of Vocational Education and Training. Volume 56, Number 3, 409-433.
Reigeluth, Ch. M. (Ed.), (1999). Instructional-design theories and models. A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory. Volume 2. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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