Reflection: Personal Learning Theory

Throughout my learning and development career, I always had a focus on experience-based learning and facilitation. As an online tutor during the pandemic, I focused on clients who had learning disabilities and ESL needs, with ages ranging from 5^th grade to adulthood. Throughout all of these experiences, I learned how to tailor curriculum and educational goals to each individual student. While working at a call center for a healthcare company, I transformed face-to-face curriculum to meet the needs of a completely digital environment. I did this by “inventing” a new form of process training that I eventually named the three “gATEs”: Educate, Demonstrate, Replicate. The curriculum I developed would start with a problem scenario (for example, a caller needing to check their insurance expiration status). I would then show the participants the process in Salesforce and finally allow them to complete the process on their own. Each scenario would increase in complexity throughout the weeks-long training session, covering diverse topics like Coordination of Benefits, formulary lookups, and call de-escalation techniques. I also divided classes into small groups with mixed performance levels to help them learn socially.

I say I “invented” the gATEs process, but in reality I had just stumbled on an already existing learning philosophy, Constructivism, without any exposure to the theory itself. Constructivism is “defined as a social-based teaching approach that encourages students to construct knowledge from the surrounding social context throughout a process of investigation; students are supposed to actively construct their own knowledge because the cognitive mechanism of their minds mediates input from the outside world through an active mental work and not a passive reception of teaching,” (Jabsheh, 2024). Additionally, Constructivism relies on connecting learners’ existing knowledge and experiences with new concepts. Narrative-based or scenario-based learning activities contribute to great learning outcomes because it seeks to increase learner engagement. From a process perspective, providing context to complex concepts connects them to practical uses, and allows learners to understand the reasons behind those processes in an organic way.

When I discovered learning theory, I knew constructivism worked well for me as an instructional designer because I was already building courses based on its principles.

I have a lot to learn, but to see my design framework in a formal learning theory really excited me because that meant I was doing something right directly through my professional experience, even though I had no real formal training as a learning and development professional. I think what stuck out to me about how current training processes work in organizations, at least the ones I have experienced, was the fact that many of them don’t allow participants to apply the concepts in a meaningful way. Formal training without relevance is passive learning at best, and downright ineffective at worst. Many training programs just consist of the facilitator reading article after article without real context, an assessment at the end of the course, and maybe a process simulation, depending on the position’s technology needs. However, when participants get dumped into their position, many of them find themselves frustrated and overwhelmed, not really understanding what they should do.

Constructivism resolves many of these problems by forcing learners to find correlations between previous knowledge and new concepts, as well as increasing engagement with the material through social dynamics. It requires a multi-perspective approach to course delivery using activities, discussions, scenarios, and other interactions instead of traditional teaching methods relying on rote memorization of content. I hope to continue my exploration of this great theory and use it more as my career in L&D progresses.

References:

Jabsheh, Abd-Al-Hameeed. “Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism as the theoretical bases for  instructional design.” Technium Education and Humanities, vol. 7, 21 Jan. 2024, pp. 10–28, https://doi.org/10.47577/teh.v7i.10576.