The Learning Curve - my interpretation

I’ve been trying to think about how and when people learn, the processes involved, and how we can improve them. My main thought is really that we don’t understand how the brain works, but we try to come up with models which seem to work and help us understand, some better than others.

One process I think that goes on is below - on the left is what I think is going on in the brain, and on the right are the tools we can use as coaches to affect the quality of the activity and learning. We do an activity, which then involves learning about something, and the end result is knowledge and/or skills.

As coaches, we can affect every part of this process, and good coaches can yield a higher quality of each, which is what I’m aspiring to. It then got me thinking:

• What is experience? Is it when we have lots of knowledge, or lots of ability, or is it when we have spent time doing something?

• And what happens when you haven’t been doing something for a while?

• What about if you’re learning more intensely, does that increase your experience?

• That’s a steeper learning curve. On the learning curve, it’s on graph, what are the axes on that graph, i.e. how do you measure learning?

I’ve tried to come up with a model for experience/learning.

So how do those two models tie together? I think that in gaining experience, there is lots of skills and knowledge acquisition, and the cycle in the first model is repeated over and over again for different skills and knowledge, and different cycles are going on continuously in parallel. I also think that memory is an issue, and memory of something is improved simply by more processing of it, i.e. the more you process something, the longer you will remember it.

You could go in to a huge if not infinite amount of detail about teaching / learning. I’ve just been thinking about how we learn because I wanted to identify some kind of process that I can work with and have some way of understanding it in my head. I have not authority on teaching or than that fact that I’m BCU/SCA coach, and am interested, so these are just wee ideas. I hope if you have read this far, you’ve found it interesting in some way.