I have been teaching in one form or another for over thirty years, the last ten of those in the technology industry. After presenting hundreds of workshops to thousands of people, I came to a critical realization a few years back: I can’t ‘teach’ people, anything. They have to ‘learn’ on their own, in their own way. That really struck home as I was reading The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

“… expert performance is acquired gradually and … effective improvement of performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks that the performer can master sequentially – typically the design of training tasks and monitoring of the attained performance is done by a teacher or a coach.” — The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

I think the core concept here is that if I, as a teacher, have sustained a high level of expertise in a field, it is assumed I know the path to reach that level. (I don’t necessarily agree with that assumption, but that’s another discussion.) It is my job as a trainer/coach to create tasks and assignments that can move the process forward in small, incremental steps without overwhelming the learner. Let’s put this in the context of learning SharePoint.

End User: “I want to start using SharePoint.”
SharePoint Guru: “Great! Create a site collection, create your subsites, within subsites set up your libraries and lists with basic workflows, pound in some content and away you go.”

Whoa!!! Slow down there, cowboy. Create a what?

Let’s try that again…

End User: “I want to start using SharePoint.”
SharePoint Guru: “One of the best places to start is to get an existing SharePoint site and practice creating and configuring libraries. By doing that, you’ll be able to start putting SharePoint libraries into context and you’ll learn the best ways to utilize libraries for your document management needs.”

One small step for SharePoint, one giant step for the beginning SharePoint user.

In 1956, George Miller did a study that proved people can only immediately comprehend objects in groups of five to seven. Marketing theories suggest that a message must be presented to a recipient five to seven times before they remember the message. I will take that farther: You must do something yourself five to seven times in a real world environment before you can call it yours.

All of the lectures and demos in the world aren’t going to get you to an expert level, even a basic competence level, without getting hands-on, mistake driven experience. Ah… that’s another one. Mistakes. That’s where learning by doing really comes from according to Roger Schank and Aristotle. If you do something five to seven times, invariably there will be mistakes along the way. Correcting those mistakes is what makes you the owner of the process, not just a cook using a cookbook.

“I can’t teach you SharePoint. What I can do, though, is show you what can be done with SharePoint, put it into context of your day to day work processes and give you some hands-on experience as a user. I would be a fool if I expected you to remember everything we do in this workshop. But what I do expect is you will remember what can be done. If you walk away with that, then I will have accomplished my goal.” — Mark Miller, Introduction to SharePoint 2007 – The Basics