The Quintessential Components of Learning Action-Based Skills
Whether your audience is a skilled employee, home tinkerer, or five-year-old learning to tie her shoes, there are five indispensable elements that are pivotal to gaining mastery – or at the very least, being able to execute a task successfully.
Repetition. Everyone knows that repetition is the bedrock of skill acquisition. It’s so much more than mindless duplication – it’s the deliberate act of refining a craft while converting repetitive movements to muscle memory and fortifying neural pathways. Essentially, it’s learning to do something so well you don’t have to keep using brainpower to think about it.
However, when we (Larabee) talk about repetition, we’re talking about repetitive demonstration. In much the same way that no five-year-old learns how to tie her shoes after being shown once, most people need to see something multiple times in order to really understand how to replicate those actions. The more complex the action, the more repetition is needed.
The problem is, many people feel that asking to see something again and again will make them look needy or, worse, incompetent. Creating a comfortable space in which they can visualize each step with as many repetitions as they need gives them the freedom to learn with confidence. If repetition breeds refinement, repetitive demonstration breeds accuracy.
Social Interaction. (Could also be called Community.) A lot of learning can happen in a vacuum, sure. But becoming a part of a community of practice and engaging with peers and mentors is how people go from newcomers to old-timers. Having a place to learn value systems, lingo, history, and culture, exchanging ideas and gaining diverse perspectives – these are all hugely important facets of skill development. It’s through these interactions where people build on their own abilities, learn alternate approaches, and accelerate progress through the collective wisdom of a group.
Scaffolding. This is a concept familiar to many, rooted in educational psychology, and instrumental in skill acquisition. At its core, it’s creating a supportive framework that gradually relinquishes support as one’s foundation becomes more firm.
The simplest way to build scaffolding into a learning solution is to identify the biggest problem areas – the part of the process that causes the most confusion, awkwardness, or error - and create extra support around those weak points. At Larabee, we differentiate “high stakes” steps from “low stakes” steps and drop digital markers to indicate to the learner that these are areas where they might benefit from some extra help.
Storytelling. Nothing, and we mean nothing, frustrates us more than lessons that are devoid of emotion and joy. Why would you slap a bunch of information gruel on a plate and serve it up to someone whose success you care about? It’s ineffective, and it’s avoidable.
An ancient and powerful tool, stories play a pivotal role in skill acquisition by contextualizing learning in both emotion and relationship. They evoke feelings, capture attention, and enhance the overall experience. But more than that, they are exquisite memory tools, especially when combined with physical actions.
The opportunity here is to connect physical actions with stories – a connection that will be reinforced each and every time that action is replicated. Whether it’s a story about a massive fail or a tiny anecdote, stories have stickiness like nothing else.
Withholding Information. In what may be the only positive use-case for this term, knowing what not to teach (and when) is just as important as knowing what to teach (and when). Focused teaching requires filtering out information that may either be overwhelming or simply beyond the scope of the learner at that particular stage in their journey.
When we were observing culinary school teaching a few years back, we noticed that the chef instructors at the beginner level were exceptionally good at resisting the temptation to fix everything and all at once. At one point a young man was grating cheese with excruciating slowness, merely grazing the cheese grater with a block of aged parmigiano reggiano while his instructor stood next to him. Later, when we brought it up with the instructor, he said, “Oh, the cheese? Yeah, that was driving me nuts. But he’s not ready for technique adjustment – he’s still learning to differentiate between cheeses.” In other words, it’s a personalized approach that’s more art than science.
Gaining mastery of tactile skills is a multifaceted endeavor that has as much to do with the shaping of one’s identity as it does physicality. When it comes to action-based knowledge, there is so much opportunity and room for improvement in terms of creating interactive, enriching, and clear journeys for learners that enliven as much as they guide.
