No Fishing, Please!

Foresaking Facipulation
& Faux Inductive Learning

“Training, huh?” the GO bus driver asked me. “Have you read….” and then he proceeded to tell me about a book he was reading on management theory and then asked, "Do you know what the first thing that disappears when a relationship goes bad? he asked. 

"Uh, no.", I replied, curiously. "What?"

"Guess", he said, glancing up into his rear view mirror smiling. 

"Um, I dunno,....Trust?"

"Nope. Guess again." 

"Uh....communication?"

"Nope, way off!" he said, clearly enjoying this game. "I'll give you a hint: It's a 7-letter word....."

I counted off the letters on my fingers: H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S? Nope, too many letters. A-F-F-E-C-T-I-O-N? No, that's 9 too..... E-M-P-A-T-H-Y? Seven!

"Empathy," I said proudly. 

"Nope! Guess again...."

"Sigh...." This line of questioning ran on for five more kilometres of stop and go traffic. But by the time he "revealed" the right answer***, I was so annoyed that I really didn't care anymore..... 

Beware of Fishing

Guessing games have a long and storied history that dates back to Rumpelstiltskin and the Riddle of the Sphinx. But when I come across them in training workshops, I wonder if they are really the best way to teach. 

For example, I was attending a brownbag lunch where the facilitator asked us to call out why participation was important in community development planning processes.

“Great,” I thought. “An Anchor task where he demonstrates Respect for our previous experience and knowledge as adult learners by asking us what we think”.

We dutifully named off our reasons: ownership, accuracy, efficiency, justice, power relations....etc.

"Thanks", he said, flipping to the next slide, "But here's what I really wanted you to say..." 

Doh! You could feel the energy hissing out of the room.

This is what I’d call a “faux inductive” exercise in which the trainer is kind of just pretending to elicit your ideas in order to get you to say what he wants, making us feel like a bunch of ventriloquists dummies.

Or worse yet, the point of the fishing expedition is to get you to name the wrong answers so he can then “reveal” the surprise “right” answer, making us all just feel, well, ….dumb.

I often see this in facilitators’ guides – those top secret manuals that only trainers ever get to see!”: “Ask the audience what they think about this. Get them to say things like….X, Y, Z….”

“Get them to say?” – That’s “facipulation” (Noteboom 2004) at its worse.

Perhaps the designers see this as a way of encouraging “audience participation” in what is otherwise a one-way presentation. But to my mind, fishing for the right answer just reinforces the power dynamics of the expert-learner relationship (especially when the learners aren't able to say the “right” word). And fishing for the right answer also eats up a lot of time.

A Better Way

To avoid fishing, remember Jane Vella’s axiom of “Don’t ask what you can tell; tell in dialogue”. Or in other words, don’t ask a question if you already know the answer.

Instead just state some of the key ideas up front and then invite them to actively reflect on these ideas in light of their experience.  

For example, if I was teaching a parenting class, I would forego the fishing expedition in favour of “telling in dialogue” as follows:

A. With a partner, review these 10 tips for helping your child manage conflict and:

• Note any tips that require clarification
• Put a checkmark beside any tips that you’re tried that work
• Cross out any ideas you’ve tried that don’t work
• Underline any new ideas that you’d like to try, 
• Add any additional tips that you think should be there.

 We’ll hear some highlights of your reflections in the large group after 5 minutes.

 Of course, you may want to just choose 1-2 or those instructions, but look how this learning task shifts the focus away: 

• from my Socratic-fisher's drone to the participants' voices engaged in actively learning through dialogue
• from just transferring knowledge to providing opportunities for the learners to take the content and run with it: to delve deeper down through Bloom’s deeper levels of learning to “comprehension”, “analysis”, "evaluation" and “synthesis”.

Imagine the difference it might make for the learners and for learning. 

Pax, dh

***Can you guess the answer to the bus driver’s question, “What is the first thing that disappears when a working relationship goes bad”? Put your answer in the text box below and I’ll make a $25 donation to the Living Oceans Society in your name when I receive the first right answer! Save the fish! Stop fishing! 

Comments

[Boyet Ongkiko]

A point well presented. We have to focus not only in eliciting an "appearance of participation" among our learners which could be well planned and orchestrated. There is no alternative to genuine participation that makes people actively engage with content and with one another.

Thanks Dwayne for this blog.

[dh]

Boyet, wonderful to hear from you all the way from the Philippines!

I think one of the problems that a lot of trainers have is that while they really do value participation and use it well in inductive / reflective / evaluative and analytical tasks, they don't have the techniques to "tell" or "teach" in a participatory fashion. So...they fall back on lectures and presentations with a fig leaf of participation via leading/rhetorical questions, Socratic dialogues, and fishing.

But I think that there are some great alternatives that we can use to present new content in a more hands-on fashion. See also two earlier posts on Creating Dynamic Present-ipations @ http://www.learningcycle.ca/blog/creating-dynamic-present-ipations-part-1.html
http://www.learningcycle.ca/blog/2010/3/20/creating-dynamic-present-ipations-part-2.html

Cheers, dh

[Matt Van Geest]

Hi DH, I appreciated this post - very insightful. I'd like to think I've moved beyond it in my own work, but I think it's easy to default to these kinds of strategies, even in my parenting! So, thanks for the helpful reminder.

Spent my whole commute home last night trying to think of a word, but I came up blank.

Also, glad you were able to engage your GO bus driver and it wasn't an OCTranspo driver going nuts on you.

Cheers,

M

[dh]

Yes, Matt, I try to stay out of the way of OC Transpo drivers when I can -- especially on my bike! :-)

But I too have to resist the temptation to fall back into "fishing" when talking with my kids. Most of the time it works, but there are times that a five-year-old does seem to benefit from being given a few options to choose from! But for adults....I try to avoid this at all costs.

Happy commuting! (or is that an oxymoron?)

[Jeanette]

Of course the 7 letter word you are looking for is: PASSION.