Stages of Learning

I liked this idea of “four layers of design” proposed by Bill Buxton, Principal Scientist for Microsoft Research, in his recent BusinessWeek article:

• design awareness
• design literacy
• design thinking
• design practice

The gist is that everyone in the product development process should be aware of design concerns and should actively cultivate a design vocabulary, working towards habits of thinking through design strategies (which anyone can learn with dedication); design practice requires more training and experience.

It was enough to get me thinking… I liked where it led but it seemed a little thin — not much substance to really make use of it.

So I started to break it down a little more, multiplying the distinctions, trying to make them more objective and concrete, generalizing the process beyond design, making a framework for “stages of learning” in general.

Here’s what I’ve got (until it gets better):

1. interest
2. engagement
3. appreciation
4. comprehension
5. articulation
6. utilization
7. adventure
8. reorientation
9. creative freedom

There’s a pattern: three sets of three. I adopted it from The Aims of Education by Alfred North Whitehead (one of my favourite philosophers; the book was introduced to me in a upper year undergraduate course on the philosophy of education).

Basing it on Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), Whitehead suggested there’s a “rhythm of education.” It starts with a stage of romance in which the student is excited by novelty, followed by a stage of precision in which analysis and formulation occurs.

Most of what we would call education happens in the stage of precision — but the first stage is actually just as important. Without first going through a stage of romance to get a general sense of the subject matter “it is simply a series of meaningless statements about bare facts, produced artificially and without any further relevance.”

In other words, precision without romance… sucks. (See my yin yang post.)

The third stage — the synthesis — Whitehead called the stage of generalization: “a return to romanticism with the added advantage of classified ideas and relevant technique.”

Think of learning to play guitar. The stage of romance involves starting to love certain songs, heroizing the talents of favourite players, playing a lot of air guitar, etc. The stage of precision involves actually getting an instrument, playing scales, learning theory and technique, etc. The stage of generalization involves performing with others, writing your own songs, etc.

Getting a little more complex, Whitehead suggested that these stages continuously reoccur, with cycles-within-cycles (and with life being one “grand cycle” from the romance of childhood, through the precision of later school years, and the generalization of adulthood).

So I broke these stages down so that each stage of the cycle is its own cycle, making nine stages altogether. I prefer to use “passion, discipline, and fruition” rather than “romance, precision, and generalization.” Here’s how it breaks down:

1. Interest (germinal passion)
2. Engagement (deliberate passion)
3. Appreciation (masterful passion)
4. Comprehension (willful discipline)
5. Articulation (precise discipline)
6. Utilization (realized discipline)
7. Adventure (willful extension)
8. Reorientation (critical assessment)
9. Creative freedom (masterful fruition)

(I’m going to use learning to play guitar as an example throughout.)

When we talk about learning we tend to focus on the middle three stages: comprehension, articulation, and utilization — aka, rudiments & fundamentals, theory, and practice (usually all at once). That kind of education is fine if you’re just looking for a mediocre, good-enough degree of mastery. People who truly excel at something start learning well before their formal lessons, and continue long afterwards.

I’m not saying you should have to excel at what you’re doing. If you’re not interested, don’t bother (though I do hope there’s something you’d at least like to excel at)…

Interest: this is the stage when you start to notice something grabbing your attention. If you’re walking along and your eye is caught by a concert poster, or if over the din of a party you notice a conversation about music and are spontaneously drawn into it, or if you find yourself remembering guitar parts and humming them throughout the day.

Engagement means deliberately acting on interest. After seeing that concert poster you actually go to the concert, you participate in conversations about music, going out of your way to be in places (with certain people) where those conversations are most likely to occur, and listening to songs over-and-over — trying harder to hear the guitar parts more exactly.

Appreciation means starting to get a sense of quality. It means developing a “taste,” but more importantly it means knowing who the experts are. At this stage your own judgement isn’t very trustworthy, so the focus should be on working out whose knowledge you trust. You’ll idolize, say, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. You’ll read Guitar World (or something) religiously while exploring the rest of the magazine rack, devouring knowledge and exploring the field. You might be settling on a teacher, a mentor, bandmates, and a circle of like-minded student-friends.

Comprehension: once you’ve acquired a sense of what you like and who to trust, you can start to put it all together (which is what the word comprehension essentially means: “grasping together”). It’s important to get a sense of something whole before starting a systematic course of study, otherwise most of what you learn will seem irrelevant and will quickly be lost. You won’t know everything, but when something new comes along you’ll know roughly where to put it or where to look for more background (even a baroque harpsichord piece might sound familiar).

Articulation: usually the most hated of all stages of learning — all of the classification and theory and memorization of rules, etc. That’s all that needs to be said about it for now.

Utilization: it’s probably impossible to go through any of the first stages without using or applying knowledge in some way, but at this point it becomes the primary focus. Hard work has already been invested and is starting to pay off.

Congratulations, you’re a guitarist! You have a regular gig with a cover band, making decent money — relative to amount of work you (don’t) do. You also teach lessons and work part-time in a guitar shop. All of your income is from music — most of which you invest in gear to record all the songs you’re writing. In the technical sense of the word, you’re a professional.

But you still have a lot to learn — starting by unlearning most of what you already know…

Adventure: Find challenges — and not just the technical kind. Sure you can thrash better than anyone else you know, but how’s your tone? Can you move people emotionally or simply make them say “wow” for five minutes? Do non-musicians listen to you? Are people humming your music throughout the day? Is your original work distinctive and original, or is it derivative and contrived?

This is where big investments in the first few stages start to really pay off. If you started playing guitar because you hoped to be the second-coming of Dimebag Darrell and you’re whole education was about learning Dimebag’s technique, then eventually that’s going to generate constraints — likewise if you concentrated too much on emulating Stevie Ray Vaughan or Andres Segovia or whoever (though you could do a lot worse, no doubt). The broader the better.

Reorientation is like discarding your old maps and theories and finding your way around with just your wits — covering everything again from the ground-up. Make your own trails, leave your own landmarks, draw new maps and theories to include what you’ve learned and what you want to teach others.

The adventure stage was about wandering and discovering new challenges and opportunities. The reorientation stage is sort of the same but it introduces the element of discipline, making adventure more systematic and articulate.

Creative freedom means you’re no longer constrained by habits or limited knowledge. When something new comes along — a new style or technique — you have enough knowledge to have a conversation about how it developed, and you can accommodate it into your own music and master it with a little bit of practice.

It also means you’re free to decide not to learn something; you’re able to explain why you don’t like it or why it doesn’t fit in with what you do. Not only do you know all the experts, you are an expert.

Most importantly, with creative freedom, it’s still fun (you’re still interested and willing to be engaged) and this passion generates enough energy to continue investing in new fields — the business side of it, for example.

Because through it all you’re not just learning how to play guitar (or how to be a designer, or whatever), you’re learning how to learn, how to be disciplined, how to be engaged, how to articulate what you know, how to go beyond that through adventurousness, how to recognize challenges and opportunities, how to live a fruitful and fulfilling life.

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Tagged as: design, mastery, music