Building Better Learners
By Holly Dolezalek

You know you're near the zeitgeist when a noun becomes a verb. More and more, people call it "Googling" when they turn to the Internet's best-known search engine to teach themselves a few salient facts or a truckload of background on a topic that's caught their interest. But what they call Googling, the training industry calls self-directed learning.

It's an area of training that is somehow ubiquitous yet under-the-radar, obvious yet ill-defined. Like its cousin informal learning, self-directed learning (SDL) is greatly desired by some organizations and barely noticed by others. But make no mistake: The smarter and speedier the world gets, the more you'll wish that your learners had some of that self-directed mojo.

"Global competition is ramping up, and everything is changing almost before you can develop training related to what used to be the new knowledge," says Lucy Guglielmino, professor of adult education at Florida Atlantic University, which has campuses in Boca Raton, Davie, Fort Lauderdale, Jupiter and Port St. Lucie. "Only the learning organizations will survive, and you can't have a learning organization without self-directed learners."

Guglielmino's name is familiar to those who want learning driven by employee initiative as well as corporate mandate. Guglielmino and her husband Paul have conducted research and authored articles about SDL for decades. In 1977, drawing on the work of Malcolm Knowles, Allen Tough, and other thinkers in this area, Guglielmino created a handy tool called the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS). The scale tests for the presence or absence of characteristics shared by self-directed learners-creativity, independence, a positive attitude toward challenges and change, for instance-and evaluates whether someone is ready to take responsibility for their own learning.

The scale can predict whether learners are ready to motivate themselves to learn in unsupervised or unstructured ways, such as a self-paced online module. But it turns out the scale can predict for other qualities as well-like high performance, for example. "In some major studies in large organizations, the individuals who came out as highly self-directed on the SDLRS also were high performers," Guglielmino says. "The link was even stronger in jobs that had a high degree of change and that required more creativity and more problem-solving." That's a link that even organizations not interested in self-directed learning might find pretty compelling.

Seek And Ye Shall Find

In some ways, Cisco is a microcosm of the work world. The San Jose, Calif.-based manufacturer of networking and communications products is fast-paced and technology-oriented, and everybody's overloaded with information. Voice mails, e-mails, pagers and cell phones make for a fractured, distraction-heavy environment, and employees don't feel like they have time to stop and learn.

To help those learners out in a way that worked with their day-to-day realities, Cisco turned to online communities, or e-communities. They created e-communities of practice that include discussion forums, chat boards, e-newsletters and other cyber-sources of knowledge that allow members to stop, learn and get rolling again.

"It allows people who are interested in a given topic, technology or product to collaborate in unconventional ways," says Marcia Sitcoske, director of Cisco's creative learning studio. "Geography doesn't matter, time zones don't matter, and in some cases it's asynchronous-you post a message and get your answer later."
At first the communities were for Cisco employees only, but now some of them allow customers to come in and share the learning.

For example, a community for networking professionals who use Cisco's routers and hubs gets a lot of traffic. Sitcoske notes that 81 percent of this community's visitors come in to troubleshoot their networking problems, and 41 percent answer other members' questions. But most importantly, she says, of all the people who visit, 89 percent report that they got some level of resolution for their question or problem. "That means that 89 percent did not pick up the phone and call the call center," Sitcoske says.

This unstructured, seek-and-ye-shall-find attitude isn't limited to Cisco's technical employees. Other departments have started to become self-directed learners, and Cisco's training department is no exception. The learning community-which is slated to become an e-community soon-meets regularly to share information, best practices, vendors or new modalities of training. "People are really good about responding and sharing their knowledge, which is vital to having a community that shares and learns together," Sitcoske says.

Steps To SDL

Clearly, there's a relationship between knowledge management and SDL. Knowledge bases and online communities are a great place for self-directed learners to find the answers they need, but giving people resources doesn't turn them into self-directed learners. On the contrary, according to Clark Quinn, it's the other way around. "There's the organizational change to create a learning culture, and then you need the right tools and resources to support a learning culture," says Quinn, executive director of Ottersurf Labs, an e-learning consulting firm based in Walnut Creek, Calif. "But the other side is, you don't necessarily have to go out and create it for them. If you give them the resources, they will create it themselves."

So how do you create a self-directed learning culture? For one thing, Guglielmino says, you don't try to do it all at once, any more than you'd reasonably expect to transition from classroom to online training all at once. You also don't expect everyone to be on board. Because our society hasn't traditionally valued SDL, she says, people need time to adjust to the idea.

"We really have been trained by our educational system not to trust or value our own learning," Guglielmino says. "We only get a grade if we learn what the teacher says is important, and parrot it back in the way that he or she wants it parroted. That's a very debilitating thing, and it creates a mental barrier that needs to be overcome."
Because of that barrier, Guglielmino notes that the idea of SDL can actually be frightening to some people. "Very often there's an initial reluctance, because it's kind of scary to take on this additional responsibility," she says. "It's much easier to wait for somebody else to say, 'This is the training we need and we've packaged it all up neatly for you.' "

Especially when using a tool like the SDLRS to determine learners' readiness for SDL, Guglielmino points out that although some people are naturally self-directed, it's also a teachable capacity. "Obviously there's a part of it that's probably innate," she says. "I called it the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale because I think it is something that can be changed and affected by our learning experiences."

Part of this change can come simply from becoming more aware of one's own capacity as a learner: preferred learning style, successful learning strategies and previous self-directed learning projects. Clark Quinn says that discussion of this kind of meta-learning-learning about learning-can help people to see that to some degree, SDL is natural to them. "If you make [SDL] explicit and get people talking about different ways of learning, it opens up the horizon to them and helps them start selecting from a richer repertoire," Quinn says.

Training professionals interested in self-directed learning will find it easier to champion it to others if they've considered their own capacity for it. Guglielmino suggests that by considering these issues, training professionals will also figure out how they can change their role to support SDL. "It's an awareness of how they can provide more choices to the learners and serve as a resource for learning as opposed to an information-giver," says Guglielmino. "It really is almost a completely different mindset. And there's a threat there as well, because they may see themselves as threatening their own role; if they're promoting SDL, then what happens to the role of the trainer?"

Not to worry, Quinn says. There are obviously plenty of training situations at every organization where SDL doesn't make sense. But in those areas where it does work, training professionals can position themselves to assist with finding or maintaining information resources, instead of as givers of data.

But the same assessment has to happen on an organizational level. Quinn suggests several questions to answer about your organization's culture before you can decide whether it can support self-directed learning. "How open are you about thinking?" he asks. "How open are you for innovation, and learning? How much do you support people learning things that aren't directly related to their job tasks?"

Quinn warns that it's essential to discover what your organization is able to tolerate in terms of mistakes and failure, because both are reliable sources of learning from which others can benefit. "I've been working with a certain large technology company and trying to get stories of failure to use to help them create scenarios where people will get trapped because they've reliably made the same mistake," Quinn says. "Yet in many cultures, it's not OK to fail. You can't get them to talk about their mistakes."

That's the key, though, to self-directed learning and to learning in general: To learn you have to be willing to risk.

Reprinted from Training magazine