The Gildea Glossary of Learning Terms

At the urging of many Curiosity Incubator | Accelerator for Good folks (🙏🏼), I've finally started writing down the glossary of terms and concepts I've come up with over the last 10+ years of building learning programmes in innovation, policy and For Good spaces. 

Hopefully they describe and help illuminate key challenges we all face in creating (or: co-creating, actually: the topic of a subsequent post I think 🧐 ) programmes which can help their participants apply what they've learnt, and help that application have real impact. 

Here (entirely at random) are my first 2: 

✨ Applied learning [not Executive Education]: 

We know that how we frame something really matters in how people engage with it, and for me, "applied learning" is the way to signpost what we're really trying to do: apply the learning, and learn from that application. 

Central in this work is co-discovery of what the landscape and barriers to the work the participants are doing might be, and co-creation of the programmatic and learning structure with organisations, stakeholders, participants. 

"Exec Ed" focuses on being education, which is uni-directional (teacher to learner) rather than bi-directional (facilitator and participant) or multi-directional (collective with lynchpin practitioner(s)), and frames learners as "Executives" (ick, right?). 

Framing learners as Executives makes people think not about the learning they are going to apply, but themselves, in the role of "Executive". Static, hierarchical, retro... rather than dynamic, innovative, collaborative. Let's be 21st rather than 19th century about this, don’t you think?

🚧 Concrete Wall

The moment when the participant in a learning programme (no matter how brilliant or transformational) goes back into the office, they hit the Concrete Wall of no one else knowing (or caring) about what they've just learnt. 

It's where there's a huge cliff of learning loss for most programmes: both individually, in terms of the team or organisation, and for the potential application of the learning. In general, we don't tend to design learning programmes that can really help participants grapple with the Concrete Wall, though we all know it exists. There are ways of doing this, but how we currently think about learning programmes precludes or marginalises most of them. It’s a huge area of possibility in terms of doing this work in a more impactful way though.

More to follow! But thought as I've been talking about this for a while, I should put digital pen to paper and just start 😁