I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately as well as a lot of learning. Those that know me well and work with me every day know that I have been on a personal quest to acquire knowledge and fine tune some professional skills as well as my attitude toward life in general. In short I feel that I am evolving into an older, wiser, and more knowledgeable adult. Imagine that. Me…wise…now there is a funny thought.

I find that learning is easy, but retention is the difficult part. When coming across a subject that is new or completely foreign to me I tend to commit it to “rote” memory as most people do. Just because I understand the rules doesn’t mean that I understand the material at hand. A person can not learn a skill simply by blindly following a set of rules. The rules need to be challenged by practical experience.

So with that being said, I pose this question: what is the definition of learning? According to the CFI Fundamentals of Instruction, the definition of learning is “a change in behavior based on experience”. Now we can transition rote memory to something we can learn or understand. Someone once told me that you know you “understand” something when you can explain it to someone else.

So now that we have learned something and we can understand it, are we now an expert? How do we know when we have actually acquired a skill? The other day I was having this very discussion with a couple of friends over lunch. I had mentioned that I wish that I had a model in my life to which I could compare my skills and rank them accordingly. It turns out there is one, the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition is a model of how students acquire skills through formal instruction and practice. With this model there are five stages that a person must go through in order to become an expert at a subject. The five stages of increasing skill is summarized as follows:

1. Novice

* “rigid adherence to taught rules or plans”
* no exercise of “discretionary judgment”

2. Advanced beginner

* limited “situational perception”
* all aspects of work treated separately with equal importance

3. Competent

* “coping with crowdedness” (multiple activities, accumulation of information)
* some perception of actions in relation to goals
* deliberate planning
* formulates routines

4. Proficient

* holistic view of situation
* prioritizes importance of aspects
* “perceives deviations from the normal pattern”
* employs maxims for guidance, with meanings that adapt to the situation at hand

5. Expert

* transcends reliance on rules, guidelines, and maxims
* “intuitive grasp of situations based on deep, tacit understanding”
* has “vision of what is possible”
* uses “analytical approaches” in new situations or in case of problems

So now you have it, my thoughts on how to take a subject and go from rote memory to understanding and then rank what level you are at it, thus acquiring a skill.