The Learning Conversation, which can be with individuals or with groups, is between the Learner and a Learning Coach. It is designed, through a series of conversations, to raise awareness of how people learn. This enables them to challenge existing skills, myths and behaviours, and transcend these to achieve a quantum shift in their learning competences.
“The focus of attention is always the Learning Conversation; fundamentally, this puts learners in conversation with themselves … Such a conversation is not just chit-chat about disconnected snippets of experience; rather it is a sustained activity creating an increased awareness of the whole experiential process of learning.”
– Sheila Harri Augstein and Laurie Thomas
The task of the Learning Coach is to make this process explicit to the learner so that gradually as they experiment in their real world, they are enabled to conduct Learning Conversations with themselves and with others. This empowers learners to make a shift from a dependent mode of learning, i.e. ‘other organised’, towards a self-organised and continuous mode of learning.
“… our observations of pre-school children at play or the admittedly more rare fully functioning adult engaged in some equally passionate activity reveals that the seed of this self-organising ability manifests itself whenever purposive and innovative processes play themselves out in learner-friendly environments; but this seed needs nurturing.”
– Sheila Harri Augstein and Laurie Thomas
By their very nature, Learning Conversations are ‘person-centred’ as defined by Carl Rogers who said:
“In a particular type of helping relationship, we free the individuals to find their inner wisdom and confidence, and they will make increasingly healthier and more constructive choices.”
Rogers identified 3 conditions which define the appropriate attitudes to take in any situation in which the development of the fully functioning person is the goal:
- Congruence: genuineness/realness, no professional front
- Unconditional positive regard: an accepting, prizing, positive, non-judgemental attitude
- Empathy: “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes”
“……the individual has within himself or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering his or her self-concept, attitudes and self-directed behaviour – and that these resources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided.”
– Carl Rogers
Learning Conversations provide a systematic, iterative set of steps involving self-generated feedback and the emergence of new and unpredictable phenomena. It empowers learners to model their learning and to act as ‘personal scientists’ developing their personal theory of how they learn and how they can revise this by experimenting on their learning in the real world.
The Learning Conversation is a well-structured approach:
It takes place at three levels:
- Task or learning
- Learning to learn
- Life relevance
and involves three dialogues:
- Process: focusing on personal learning experiences
- Support: helping learners to cope with the effects of learning leading to change
- Referents: establishing criteria by which to assess competence and improvements in competence
These levels and dialogues are intertwined within any given Learning Conversation according to the needs and responses of the learner.
Typically, there are four key parts to a Learning Conversation the outcomes of which are recorded each time in a Personal Learning Contract, which can also cover a group:
- Purpose: What do I want to achieve as a first/next step?
- Strategy: What actions shall I take to achieve my purpose?
- Outcome: How will I know whether my actions have been successful?
- Review: When, how and against what criteria shall I review the process?