In listening to Dave Cormier’s session yesterday afternoon on rhizomatic learning (video below) I was trying to pay attention to my self-talk – that conversation in my head. Which concepts were leading me to make connections to things I (think I) know, from my own experience? What idea keeps pulling at me, like a 4-year-old trying to grab your attention?

A lot of concepts connected. But what pulled at me was thinking about shifting power – changing the dynamic between instructor and learner.

Two quick things to understand where I am, today, as a practitioner that will put this into context.

My understanding of cognition tells me I flat out cannot teach anyone anything. The best I can hope for is that learners take what I share and make their own connections with concepts and content. If successful we can all experience the act of doing something and have some common ground for sharing insights and tacit understanding about that doing. But we do not become cognitive mirror images of each other. (See my thoughts on The Reflective Practitioner for an example of what this looks like in expert-novice interactions). For example: I can look at an organizational case study on knowledge-sharing (what I teach) with a group of students. We have some common language to “see” things in the case. But no one shares exact, duplicate mental models of what’s going on in the case. Each is individual. My understanding of “tacit know-how” is different than everyone else’s because we connect it with different, unique experiences and concepts. But we can come together in a way that is generally useful for performing an act: analyzing a case study.

Insight 1: Give up thinking I have any “teaching” power.

The second bit is about complexity. Cormier referenced Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework in his talk. I also use it in my class and it is definitely worth exploring (his 2007 article in Harvard Business Review with Mary Boone is a great introduction to the model). This framework is really an elegant expression of how to divide the environment in which you operate into different contexts: simple, complicated, chaotic, complex and disordered. Let’s just say that my experience aligns with the thinking behind Cynefin. Most of what I work on clearly falls into the complex environment. And the lesson there is: There is no “answer.” Some things will work; many things may work. Some things will fail to work. But in the end you have to let go of the notion that there is a single right answer and instead learn how to probe, sense and respond.

Insight 2: Give up thinking I have any answers.

To recap: I cannot teach anyone anything. And I have no answers to the questions raised in the subject area in which I teach. So if I actually believed in some power dynamic that puts me “in charge” of what students learn – it’s either based on faulty cognitive and situational assumptions, or it relies entirely on some institutional power granted me (grading) and really has nothing to do with learning.

Now we’re starting to get somewhere.

This is actually a very freeing set of insights. I do obviously know something and I have a great deal of professional experience in the topics that I teach. But what I have come to realize is that my best instructional strategy is to design a space in which my class members and I — as co-equal learning partners — can experience exploring a particularly interesting topic. The course container is simply a contract among us involving time and topic.

Several challenges exist in attempts to execute this strategy even when you believe it is a logical “probe” (in the Cynefin sense) as I do. Grading, scaffolding, knowing when the approach is not appropriate. A lot to explore there. But the one that kept pulling at me is this:

What if you truly wish the power to shift – for learners to own their learning – but no one takes up the offer?

In the session that I attended, Cormier spoke about “keeners” — apparently a lovely bit of Canadian slang meaning the type of students who are driven to succeed, and success = doing what the instructor wants and getting a top grade. They’ve succeeded at the game of schooling. Now tell them they are playing an entirely different game. Disjuncture.

This is a real phenomenon. I have experienced it in my work with graduate students, as have my colleagues. Kimberly Scott, the director of the program in which I teach, is beginning to do some interesting work in unpacking potential links behind personality and who seems to thrive more quickly in a “you own it” learning environment and who struggles. But the underlying challenge is about learning how to learn when no one is there but yourself to say what specific topics to explore and when you should stop on a particular activity.

Let me give an example. We run two courses that are designed as problem-based learning activities. In both cases, students are presented with questions to problem-solve that are clearly rooted in complex (think Cynefin) environments. The question has some boundaries but there are a lot of potential paths you could explore to discover a good solution experiment (probe). And after you get into exploring, you have to decide when to stop. We find ourselves as instructors often doing a lot of coaching around these issues: Being comfortable with knowing which potential paths to follow and when to stop exploring.

It’s a challenge for many of us. But we do frame it as learning how to co-learn. And within an institutional, class-based setting like ours, the support structure is there to do this role-play. Yes, I recognize there is still some of the power dynamic at work here. We’re pushing the needle but that instructor-student power thing is still at play.

And that is why cMOOCs are so insightful. The scale stresses everything. In my class world there is the comfort of 25-30 students knowing that when they are struggling with finding the boundaries in my course they can find assistance from me. Not the same at #etmooc. Keith Brennan gets at how #etmooc benefits from the work of Alec Couros and Alison Seaman in his post How to respond to criticism and influence people. The dynamic is clearly not the same and Keith positions it as aspirational for educators. I agree.

But I also realized last night that I am feeling the same tension as students facing our ambiguous, problem-based learning courses. We are all clearly co-learners in this #etmooc experience. And the difficulty we are experiencing — it’s overwhelming, where do I start? stop? have I learned? — is the same for anyone who has the game changed on them by blowing up the instructor-student power dynamic. Uncomfortable, but ultimately worth the effort in learning how to learn.

Filed under: etmooc, MOOC Tagged: Dave Cormier, rhizomatic learning