Stever, insightfully wrote:
> (*) The replies to my postings on the "Teaching Smart vs. Not" thread
> mostly seemed to boil down to: "learning in teams works best when you
> choose people who want to learn and want to work in teams." My question
> here follows from that: given that many people don't inherently want to
> learn, and may not care incredibly much about their job, what can we do to
> get them learning? The main answers that come to mind are: threaten them,
> reward them, entice them, construct a situation where IN THEIR MINDS, they
> perceive the need to learn. How one does the latter is far from obvious to
> me.
I've tried:
Threatening. . .
Which was met with resistance and resentment.
Rewards. . .
Which met with suspicion, and strangely, resentment (being rewarded to
do something they didn't really want to do).
Enticement. . .
Never tried it, don't know how to do it.
Create an environment where there is a perceived need to learn. . .
This describes every work environment I've found myself in. The bottom
line, it seems to me, is that most people have not learned the simple
lesson that life is most rewarding when you spend your time doing
something you love. The need for money is placed above the need for
personal satisfaction and growth, and thus people end up hating their
work, which inhibits their desire to learn.
I remember a kid I went to High School with. He hated math; he hated it so
much he had 43 absences out of a total of 45 days in the term. He took an
automechanics class; he fell in love with it. One of the problems he had
to figure out was the volume of a cylinder. Guess what? He learned to do
math, and he learned it in a hurry. But then he was doing what he loved,
and math was a natural extension of that activity.
How do you get someone to learn who doesn't want to learn? You don't. You
can't force it and you can't reward it. All you can do is try to find
people who love what you need done, and let them loose. We all chose to
work where we do; why don't more people make better choices? I think that
is the heart of the issue.
-- Ben Compton "Friends are the ornaments of life." E-Mail: bcompton@geocities.com Phone: (801) 222-6178 Fax: (801) 222-6993 Web: http://www.e-ad.com/ben/BEN.HTMLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>