Creative transformation means re-visioning the learning environment by adopting a set of principles that enable authentic learning experiences.  Traditional teaching techniques are no longer appropriate in a world of rapid technical and conceptual change. Successful learning practices need to be flexible and individualistic but also capable of mirroring professional practices at their best.  This post details a preliminary list of principles designed to establish a set of transformational practices that create and support authentic learning.

As promised in this blog entry, it looks back at almost five decades of careers and of alternative approaches to learning.

Every personal journey is a preparation for the next and here I try to share with the reader those learning strategies and experiences that have helped me in the past and which I expect will support me in the future. I've written this in the hope that it might provide some context and perhaps guidance or ideas for those new to the field who face uncertain career paths.  If there is anything to be learned, it's that we can't always predict what skills we might need but that creativity and planning for continual personal transformation seems a sound approach for the 21st Century.

Breakthrough ideas have never been more important than they are now in education and training because current practices are simply inadequate to the task of preparing for the future. You can expect a lot of resistance to change – on many levels up and down the academic hierarchy – including from your cohorts.

Sometimes blind faith is more important than academic logic when it comes to breaking new boundaries and this is an example of why experimentation and breaking boundaries are so important if we are to reinvent learning.

Every day we are exposed to a rapidly changing, moment-by-moment digital media environment that demands strategic filtering and immediate response to a multitude of visual and auditory stimuli and their underlying messages. Constant digital distractions, multitasking and task switching plague our ability to concentrate, our aptitude for sustained intellectual focus and they interfere with our capacity for deep, persistent engagement.   No wonder students find it difficult to focus!

 

Companies need a valid, reliable, unbiased and efficient screening method by which to evaluate the performance standards of job applicants.

Educational and training institutions should be able to guarantee that graduate skills meet predictable, industry-accepted standards of performance to employers and to their graduates.

How do we best prepare ourselves, and those we train, mentor and educate, to acquire life-long learning skills for the Conceptual Age?   When imagination and creativity are more critical than facts and theories, the rapid evolution of our technical and conceptual environment demands that we rethink how, when and where we are to best acquire competencies that will sustain us in the coming years.

 

In this post I describe the development and evaluation of a prototype training school in China that was the result of frustrations with formal education systems around the world.  Four key principles were used to formulate the program design, curricula and learning process - enhanced learning through rapid iteration, ubiquitous critique and feedback, critical and creative thinking and professional mentorship.

A training school was developed and ran for two years based on optimizing these principles and the results made available for evaluation and review.