In InfoMine, Vol. 4, No. 2, I introduced you to David Perkins’ concept of expert learners. Expert learners use learning techniques that increase their reflective intelligence. As a result, expert learners are able:

• To generate the knowledge required to anticipate and to create the future
• To take the initiative to identify the root causes of problems at their level, and to solve those problems
• To create a culture in their organizations that favours two-way communication
• To sustain a high level of internal motivation, so that they can share ownership of both the problem and the solution to the problem
• To learn continuously, in order to develop themselves and their organizations, and to develop the skills and capabilities to design and implement their own learning systems
• To release their talent and energy for innovation, creativity, and risk, so that they can overcome any individual and/or organizational barriers to change
• To increase their confidence, their capacity to understand others, their ability to achieve results in spite of uncertainty, and their capacity to work with diverse people and groups
• To embrace complexity, uncertainty, change, and diversity, so that they can anticipate, and respond effectively to, any change or circumstance

According to Perkins, expert learners consider any difficulty an intellectual challenge; on the other hand, nonexpert learners give up when the intellectual going gets tough. This does not mean that nonexpert learners have less intellectual capability. According to Honey and Mumford, it simply means that nonexpert learners learn by chance and through crisis, whereas expert learners learn by reflecting on their experiences, and by planning to learn before an experience occurs. As a result, expert learners more often experience more success throughout all aspects of their lives.

The upcoming InfoMine series focuses on tools and techniques that can help you to become an expert learner. To begin, let us explore what it means to be an expert learner.

Peter Honey and Alan Mumford, primary researchers in management learning from the United Kingdom, explain the difference between expert and nonexpert learners. In their research of 144 directors, they identified four different approaches to learning:

• The Intuitive Approach
• The Incidental Approach
• The Retrospective Approach
• The Prospective Approach

These four approaches are described below.

The Intuitive Approach “involves learning from experience but not through a conscious process.” In other words, people who use this approach simply learn as they experience life, but cannot describe how they learned something. They learn by chance. This group of people struggle the most with believing that reflecting on learning, and planning to learn, are beneficial to their success in both work and personal life.

The Incidental Approach “involves learning by chance from activities that jolt an individual into conducting a post mortem.” People who use this approach learn from the traumas that life presents. They are made aware of the need to change their behaviour through a crisis that shows them that something is not working, and that they must change their approach to this particular situation. These people tend to rationalize their way of learning by using the cognitive illusion of predictability in hindsight (InfoMine, Vol. 2, No. 2). Then, they move on to the next experience without having analyzed the learning that the crisis offered. They miss the opportunity for reflecting on the experience to determine what worked and what did not work, and then planning to learn from the next experience.

The Retrospective Approach “involves learning from experience by looking back over what happened and reaching conclusions about it.” People who use this approach have no difficulty reflecting on their experience and analyzing it to identify the learning points. However, they tend only to look backwards on a situation, rather than looking forward and planning to learn. The Retrospective Approach has three steps:

1. You have an experience.
2. You review the experience to identify learning points (e.g., what worked, what did not work, and why).
3. You reach conclusions about what the experience has taught you.

The Prospective Approach “involves all the Retrospective elements but includes an additional dimension. Whereas Retrospection concentrates on reviewing what happened after an experience, the Prospective Approach includes planning to learn before an experience.” This approach has the advantage of helping people to become ready to learn the most from anything that a situation may offer. People who use this approach are called expectant learners, because they expect to learn from everything. Perkins would call people who use this approach expert learners. The Prospective Approach has four steps:

1. You develop a plan to learn something (e.g., something that you do not know how to do well).
2. You implement the plan by having an experience in which you are consciously learning.
3. You review what occurred as a result of implementing the plan.
4. You reach conclusions about what worked and why, and what did not work and why. Then, you circle back to the first step above.

An Effective Learning Process

It is clear from these descriptions that the nonexpert learner primarily uses both the Intuitive and Incidental Approaches, whereas the expert learner primarily uses both the Retrospective and Prospective Approaches. As much as possible, the expert learner tries to plan his or her learning consciously, in order to be aware of what he or she is learning.

To become an expert learner, you need to use a mix of both the Retrospective and Prospective Approaches, in order to be effective in the learning process and to be successful in your life experiences. In choosing to use these two approaches, you make a commitment to a journey of taking advantage of everything that life has to offer — and to learning from it. You make a commitment to becoming the best that you can be.