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Learning Leaders: Allison Rossett on Performance Support and Critical Thinking
Allison Rossett,a Guild Master and professor emerita of educational technology at San DiegoState University, consults on learning and technology for corporations andgovernment agencies. She’s also a prolific author and she keynotes and speaks atconferences all over the world, most recently at DevLearn. I recently spokewith Allison about the future of eLearning and the importance of both trainingand performance support. The interview has been edited for length and clarity;this is the first of two parts.
Guild Master AllisonRossett
Pamela S. Hogle: You told a different interviewer,about a year and a half ago, that the future of eLearning is in on-demand,personalization, and mobile; and that big systems, heavy LMSs, and MOOCs arelosing favor. What is your answer today to the question of what the future ofeLearning looks like and what’s on the way out?
Allison Rossett: I don’t think that I would changewhat I said. I still think that size matters; less is more.
It depends on your vantage point. If you’re the CEO oryou’re the university president, or if you’re the chief learning officer, andif you are mainly about business case, numbers, money—sure, MOOCs make sense toyou. One expert; many, many more students. That makes sense, from thatperspective. But from a student experience, from an individual educationalperspective, it’s ridiculous.
I believe that size matters, and we need to move toward “Lessis more.” Which means:
- Smaller morsels of learning
- Easily accessible learning and referencematerials
- Apps that are small and usable
- Complexity rendered in smaller parts
Quality comes from smaller assetstargeted to individual needs, with obvious, strong links to strategicorganizational goals.
We in workplace learning, we in technology-based learning—wecare about instructional design and we care about employee experience, but Idon’t know that we talk enough about our influence on organizational culture. Ithink we have to take more responsibility for culture; we must be culturevultures. What that means is, we need to get our arms around line leadershipand the relationship with supervisors and managers. What we do [eLearning] ismoving away from our buildings and our rooms to their workplaces, which makesline leadership and managers and supervisors even more critical than they werebefore, and they’ve always been critical.
We need to do more information sharing, more examplesharing, more communities, more curation.
We have to capture best practices and make them available sopeople can use them.
We need more partnerships with the line, more partnershipsbeyond the walls, with universities and nonprofits.
We need more digital, more mobile.
We need to rely more on our associates to take responsibilityfor growing, finding, and adding to the rich resources available to them.
We need more self-directed learning. We need to offer clear expectationsand guidance for them on how to reach for what they need when they need it, andwhere they need it.
PH: When you talk about performance support making a difference in anorganization, what, specifically do you mean? What types of eLearning contentdo you see as performance support vs. training? How do you parse thatout?
AR: I’ve spent my life working on this problem.
Performance support is job aids on steroids. That’s what itis. It’s on steroids. It’s using technology to deliver job aids, information atthe point of need.
A really good way to make the distinction is to think aboutthe difference between Duolingo [Editor: and performance support]. Many people knowwhat Duolingo is; Duolingo is an online language-learning program. It presentsinformation, then it tests you. If you get it wrong, it tests you again. Morepresentation; more testing; drill and practice. Over time and place, every day,it reminds you to do it. The point of the program is to move the languages’competence from out there to inside you, in your memory. Okay, that’s Duolingo.
On the other side, job aids on steroids, performancesupport, would be GPS. That’s the creation of an asset out there that you reachfor at the moment of need to enable you to be smarter, to perform more smartlythan you can without it. GPS will enable you to get where you need to gowithout knowing much.
Let’s talk about it in another way.
Albert Einstein said, “I don’t need to know my telephonenumber.”
When somebody said, “You’re the smartest man in the world.How come you don’t know your telephone number?”
He said, “I don’t need to know it; I’ve got it written downright here.”
Einstein was big on performance support.
On the other hand, another very smart guy named Sal Khan has all this instruction uponline, and the point is to take it from the outside and move to the inside ofpeople so that they learn it; they know it.
Learning enables people to say, “I get it! I knowthat.”
Performance support enables people to say, “I found it. Thathelps me do it.”
If you’re doing learning, you would be doing things likedrill and practice, scenario-based eLearning, exercises, assessments, anddiagnostics.
If you’re engaged with performance support, you might belooking at a checklist, a bar code reader, location-based guidance, lots ofexamples with attributes pulled out to make it clear; short and sweet.
What’s interesting is, for most topics, you would wantpeople to know some of it by heart, and some of it via reference. Let’stake an example of a doctor, an MD. Tons and tons of learning; they need toknow many things by heart. They need to reach inside, into mind, heart, andbelly—and do things and do things with sensitivity. They must do/decide thingsall the time; do who knows what things, many surprising things, highly criticalthings.
However there’s also performance support—now online, thePDR, Physicians’ Desk Reference—for things that they use only occasionally orthings where they do not dare to make a mistake.
But there are other things. Let’s take an example ofsomebody who works in the fast food industry. Leadership does not want toinvest in a whole lot of building things into mind, heart, and belly becausethere’s so much turnover. So instead, they provide a little bit of development,mostly in customer service skills and safety. Much more in the product andproduct assembly is done through performance support.
PH: You recentlypresented a talk at DevLearn on critical thinking. How should people beharnessing mobile tools to nurture critical thinking?
AR: I really like this topic. I was doing some workat the Defense Acquisition University, DAU, they’re real interested in thistopic because the people who buy things and manage contracts in the Departmentof Defense, they can’t just be on autopilot. They have to be critical thinkers.
The U.S. Department of Labor says this: Critical thinking isthe raw material of workplace success.
And I think it’s true.
So what is critical thinking? Before we say how to, it’simportant to say what it is.
Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinkingwhich attempts to reason at high levels of quality in fair-minded ways.Critical thinkers strive to diminish the power of their biases. It’s basicallydiscerning judgment based on standards. And these are usually standards thatyou can point to.
The first thing that is interesting to me about criticalthinking, after you get beyond the definitions, is that it can be taught.There’s a body of literature that has actually looked at this. The military hasworked hard, for example, to help pilots become better thinkers. So we can andmust boost this. We in workplace learning can advance this goal.
So, how to do it. If you believe it, and you think aboutthat definition, you’re going to be pretty good at figuring out how to do it.But there are two parts to it.
One is, you push problems out to associates to solve. Youpush out examples of problems that were well-thought-out and solved; you dothink-alouds; you share thought processes and point out what made it a goodprocess. You provide people with criteria and standards. I think this goes backto the culture vulture thing: You provide an environment where conversation anddiscussion about criteria for excellent performance is rampant; people talkabout this—including talking about where they made mistakes. One other thing: Youprobably don’t do lectures on critical thinking.
The other thing that you can do to make it happen more ispoint to opportunities to be a critical thinker. It’s not just that you need toshow them what the standards are and examples of it and press opportunities todo it through learning, but also ask, “Where in the natural course of work as anurse or a retirement specialist do you see opportunities to think critically?”And that will increase the likelihood that they actually might do it.
In an eLearning context: If you’re going to do compliancetraining, for example, on diversity and race relations, you would do all thethings I just described—as well as showing opportunities to step in, perhaps,when you see someone is hanging up a poster that might offend someone.
One of the things that I saw that was interesting on thisparticular topic: There’s the person who’s acting and the person who’s beingacted upon, then there’s the observer. So, helping people in an environment seeopportunities to do the right thing.
As an instructional designer, I am going to show them whatit looks like in a variety of ways. I’m going to ask them to act as if, and Iam going to also show them, in the normal course of a morning, when you mightget a chance to be that way. Why can’t that be done in eLearning? That can bedone beautifully in eLearning.
PH: Some researchers are looking at using virtualreality for some of these types of training.
AR: The one example I saw of that was at a universitywhere they were trying to give people a sense of what schizophrenia was like,and I thought it was immensely powerful. So I think virtual reality would allowyou to walk in the shoes of a __________. That’s pretty darn cool.
I think that is very promising. But you know, most promisingof all—back to culture vulture—managers and supervisors who give a hoot aboutall of this.
I like virtual reality; I’m all for it. But if after they do the virtualreality … the, I think it was the Navy, had this horrible sexual harassmentthing in Vegas [Tailhook, in 1991]. The problem with virtual reality is, it ain’tshipboard. They need to bring it home. If you send everyone to sexual harassmentclass or VR training, and you go back and the next weekend you all go to Vegasfor Tailhook, what’s going to happen? Which is more powerful? Let’s get realhere. It’s culture.
