Gordon Dryden Response to Drill and Practice

Gordon is our guru from down under. As a media icon in New Zealand he has studied the world of learning during his travels, and has credits in transforming learning in whole counties. His book “The New Learning Revolution” has sold over 10 million copies and he was the Keynote speaker at the Greater Arizona eLearning Assoc. conference in Mesa last May.

Gordon…

Re "drill and practice" as the forgotten requirement, I think this needs to be balanced - and I come back to Buckingham and Coffman's book, "First, Break All the Rules", with its summary of ALL Gallup's polling of "what makes great companies and great managers":

1. Everyone has a talent to be great at something (and talent is different than "specific skill". See their definition of different elements of "inbuilt talent" on page 180 of "The New Learning Revolution" www.networkpress.co.uk .

2. Great managers select for specific talents and build them into multi-talented teams.

3. Select for talent, but then train to add all the additional skills.

4. Some of those skills are "a good grounding in basics": reading, writing, math, spelling, composition and personal and inter-personal communications skills. Others are very specific to tasks and jobs (a nurse must have a great inbuilt "empathy talent", but needs specific nursing skills; a "great communicator" will have natural "communications" talent, but will then need additional "drill skills" - in my case keyboard touch typing, good spelling, ability to write clearly, specific computer skills, and - depending on what branch of communications - skills in journalism, radio, television, advertising and many other fields.

5. So some of those inbuilt talents show a great propensity for success (I could never be a great composer or musician, a great surgeon or a great accountant, or a great fiction writer - although I could perhaps learn to be reasonably good at the latter; I don't have the inbuilt personality, passion, empathy or behavioral traits.) Nor have I ever had the drive to be a "naturally brilliant ball player" - so could never be a Gretsky, Jackson, Tiger Woods or Federer.

6. And I believe the same applies to schooling - vitally important to:

a. Develop and nurture talent - and again the ability to flower in multi-talented teams. (From my experience with the best IT schools around the world, this is one of their great attributes: by starting kids from grade one as video producers and editors, scriptwriters, designers, musical composers - they show how talents can come together, and how each person can blend his or her best talent with those of others.)

b. Develop core competency in the basics: reading, writing, spelling, basic math, basic science - and often that requires drill.

c. Develop other social and lifestyle skills: reasonably good communicators, confident to operate in any company.

d. Develop creative abilities: the ability to be creative thinkers and creative producers and contributors.

e. Inculcate a drive to be high achievers in specific skills to build on one's own talent. Again that will require addition "drill and kill" for (as in your example) shooting goals at basketball, playing every possible on a tennis or squash court, kicking goals at rugby, playing a musical instrument.

f. And introduce assessment systems that both record "standardized test results" (where appropriate) and enable students to assemble digital portfolios to demonstrate their talents and skills.

I am sure you are aware that the US public school system, in particular, seems to have substituted "standardized testing" (largely based on rote-learning drills) as the main form of assessment - in a land where your incredible success has been based on terrific "non-standardized creative ideas and non-standard innovation!”

Key point: eLearning is not just about developing "repetitive drill skills". Memorization of how to spell and count (while important) is not the only thing that matters.

In New Zealand, I often use Peter Jackson and his team as "New Zealand's answer to America's Silicon Valley" (you may remember that analogy when receiving our honorary doctorates at UAT). Here is a guy who never went to college, but started making his first movie, with an 8 mm camera at age eight, and even then dreamed of producing his own version of King Kong. Years later, in one night he and his team picked up 11 Academy Awards in a night - and, by putting together an incredible multi-talented team, have turned Wellington (our capital city) into a South Pacific Hollywood.

He is, of course, highly skilled in a multiplicity of skills (and painstaking in every detail) - as well as being brilliantly talented.

Feel free to circulate this to the team if you feel it might add to the discussion.

I always have a real fear (especially from having worked in Japan, Singapore and China) that eLearning may become synonymous with rote learning. That is PRECISELY what happened in Singapore when it launched the world's biggest-per-capita investment in technology in public schools. And in China, the schools are still using computers in a very narrow way when, for example, most kids learn English much faster out of school singing English to karaoke machines in coffee shops than they do in their computer lab.

Best wishes to the team.

Gordon Dryden, Down Under gorden@learningwewb.co.nz