What I'm reminded of each morning in the pool...
Transcript of this video:
In recent years I’ve become a bit of a swimming obsessive. I go to the pool pretty much every day here in Cambridge.
And one of the things I have to remember pretty much every time I get in the pool is that there are going to be people in there who are not following the same rules as I am for how they swim,
whether they keep to the sides of the lane in a way I would like; whether they swim to the end and then turn around; or whether they do a drift across.
That can quite often conflict with my preferred approach, and I can spend my time in the pool feeling angry that they’re not following the rules: rules that are partly official and partly in my head, and wishing that the lifeguards would do something about it.
And then I usually just chill and go, no, this is today’s swimming. I’m going to have to take account of all these different styles of swimming. And there may be six or seven other people in the lane, and they will all be executing a slightly different manoeuvre, but as time passes, I wise up to who’s in there and I adjust accordingly.
And I think it’s one of the benefits of the practice, actually, to remind myself of that.
I think it’s a good thing to remember when you’re working with people that it’s actually quite stressful to try and enforce regulations when they’re not strictly necessary.
And it’s often better to let people adjust to each other’s style instead of trying to impose a single one, tempting though that often is.
And related to that, Donald Clark shared a really interesting piece of research the other day,
which looked at three different ways of teaching kids the six, seven and eight times – I think it was those – multiplication tables.
And one group was presented with two facts at a time to learn.
Another group was given eight facts.
And the third group was allowed to pace themselves according to their natural acquisition rate.
And what they found was that when you let them learn at their natural rate to learn as many things as they could cope with, those were the ones that outperformed in subsequent recall tests.
It reminds me of a very wise psychotherapist who said that most of the conflicts he saw in married couples were actually down to differences or conflicts of pace.
So allowing and finding a way to manage that we have different paces is pretty important.
And I think part of what makes facilitating a group interesting and difficult is trying to find a pace of work that is bearable for everyone.
If you force the pace, there’ll be some people who will keep up with the others who start to fall behind.
If you go too slow, you get the same problem in reverse.
I guess it’s why I tend to favour, if I’m in a kind of a learning environment, I really favour experiential learning because you can give people an experience and then allow them to learn at their own pace so rather than telling them what they’ve learned allow them to learn what it is they learn to set their own acquisition rate if you like and it’ll be a different rate and different learnings for different people just as there are different speeds and styles in my medium lane in the pool every morning.
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
