Today I am climbing a ladder! I promise it is safe and I will not fall off...

The Conscious Competency Ladder

The  ladder of learning can be steep and other times quite flat. Today is the day that my students will be able to decide which rung they are standing on. The beautiful thing about adults in the classroom is that they will be happy to take responsibility for their learning and accept that they need to learn more. Sometimes the skill comes easily and other times it is a struggle. Usually when they discover where they are on the ladder they will make great strides to move to the next rung!

Noel Burch, an employee with Gordon Training International, developed the Conscious Competence Ladder in the 1970s. You can use it to manage your emotions during a potentially challenging learning process.The model has four learning levels:

1. Unconsciously unskilled (Unconsciously Incompetent) – we don't know that we don't have this skill, or that we need to learn it.
2. Consciously unskilled (Consciously Incompetent) – we know that we don't have this skill.
3. Consciously skilled (Consciously Competent) – we know that we have this skill.
4. Unconsciously skilled (Unconsciously Competent) – we don't know that we have this skill (it just seems easy).

The model can be a useful guide for your own learning, but you can also use it when you are coaching others, to guide them through the emotional ups and downs of acquiring new skills. What rung are you on in your learning?

This week I was asked why I want to teach adults and it has led me to do some thinking about all that I have learned since I have entered my Provincial Instructor Diploma Program. Why indeed!

I think the greatest factor is that I feel I can bring things to life and engage learners in the subject matter. When I first began training people (through the election process in my local electoral district) I thought of myself as a performer. Yes - I was "the Sage on the Stage" and here we are almost a year into the diploma program and I realize that while I do have a "performance" side - I also have an ability to engage other adults and present material and allow them to make their own decisions. I realize now that the better teaching scenario is to "Guide on the Side" by allowing adults to take responsibility for their learning and to assist them as they see fit. These characteristics are what make teaching adults an enjoyable experience for me.

Characteristics of the Adult Learner

Adults are a pleasure to teach as they are generally motivated and eager to be in a classroom setting. I enjoy the interactions they provide and the input to the curriculum that they provide from their own life experiences. In particular I love that moment when a student has an "a-ha" moment and the concept cements itself in their own mind or body.

The word to describe adult learning is Andragogy. Quite a coincidence that this is the majority of my name? I think not! It is quite obvious that I should be involved in this experience.

Today a friend told me that I tickle her brain. What a sweet and funny sentiment! It has occurred to me that it has taken me exactly 10 weeks to effect a change in one of my student’s lives. This certainly tickled my brain!

To put it all in context – I was teaching my adult ballet class and I always start by asking the ladies to speak about something that happened in the last class that has stuck with them for the week. I feel that this interlude brings their minds back to the dance studio and gets them remembering what we worked through the week prior and hopefully “gets their head in the game” before we begin the class. It always surprises me what is meaningful to my students and also what has stuck!

The surprising thing that was brought up this week was our discussion last week about how exercise can actually fight debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s. There is a good article about this subject by US News. Another of the ladies said she has been struggling to get her legs to do the correct exercises at the ballet barre and last week she stopped focusing on her legs and focused on her posture and body structure. Her big surprise was that when she shifted the focus off the legs onto her body – her legs suddenly started doing exactly what she wanted them to do. Again the brain is an amazing machine!

Just to keep my ladies going I promised that I would stop teaching them about their brains and teach them about balance and core body strength. I am just wondering how long it will take them to figure out that no matter what I teach them about their body – it always relates back to their brains! I guess they will figure it out when reading this blog! Just in case you want to know why you have a brain – I have found a TED Talk by Daniel Wolpert that explains it beautifully!

The sun is out - the birds are singing and I feel like I want to break into song. Happy by Pharrell Williams comes to mind first off... but you don't want to hear me sing.

  So while Pharrell has produced a wonderfully popular song that has stayed on the top 40 for quite a while - it started to bug me last night. Yes - it is very repetitive. And the funny thing is that I was talking to my ballet students about the virtues of being repetitive! What can repetition do for us? In a song it is pleasant for a short time and then after a while it just starts to grind on my nerves. BUT - in motor-skill development repetition is wonderful. Why do we do it? To create muscle memory!

What is muscle memory? It's training our muscles right? Wrong! We are really training our brain! Of course you know that as everything you do is managed by your brain. Here is the interesting part - while you are training your brain to respond in a certain manner you are also rewiring your brain. You are creating new neural pathways and stimulating brain activity. This happens in physical exercise (you have to think about it to do it well) and it happens when you do something like Sudoku. By creating new neural pathways you are also fighting brain degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. So get out there and be repetitively active!

The saddest news I have for you is that research has found that it generally takes about 10,000 hours of practice to reach mastery of a skill. I am sure that is why you may want to start very early in life learning physical skills. If you want to check out more information about muscle memory I have two websites for you to visit - one from lifehacker and one from Sports n' Science.

Now go back and crank up Pharrell and dance - only 9,999 hours and 56 minutes still to go to reach mastery!!!