The Four Stages of Learning

Following the post on the top ten writing tips, I just wanted to have a little look at one theory of how we learn. Sometimes tips or criticism can be useful, but sometimes they can make us seem like we’re going backwards before anything improves. The Four Stages of Learning Theory has a little light to shed on that...

Easy as riding a bike

The four stages are something that we can apply to anything that we learn, from poetry techniques to riding a bike. Knowing which stage you are at with a particular technique can help you know where to focus and give you confidence that with a little more perseverance things are going to improve and get easier for you. The four stages are: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence and Unconscious Competence. Those sound a bit dry, so let’s take the example of learning to ride a bike and I'll illustrate what each of those four stages really means.


Stage One
Unconscious Incompetence

So to begin with, at some stage of your life, you don’t know how to ride a bike. But not only that, you don’t even know that bikes exist. You don’t even know that you don’t even know how to ride a bike. There’s a whole world of pedals and stabilisers and handlebars that you haven't ever come across. You don’t know anything about bikes at all, not how to ride one, not that anyone else can ride them, not that one day you can learn to ride one, not even that they exist. That’s stage one. You want to get from A to B, you just walk. Or crawl - that's all you know!

Stage Two
Conscious Incompetence

Stage two begins when you see that TV programme where the kid is riding their bike, or when your friend or neighbour gets a bike and you see them riding King-of-the-castle-like around on it. You can see that there is such a thing as a bike, you know that other people can ride them and you want to learn how to ride them. You get on and you fall off straight away. You get on. You fall off. You get on. You fall off, graze your knee, feel like an idiot and you go crying all the way home… You realise that you don’t know how to ride this beautiful machine that someone else has introduced you to. How unfair! How frustrating! That’s what stage two is like, painful and trying.

Stage Three
Conscious Competence

Then suddenly, one day, either through practice, or with the help of someone who knows, whatever form your stabilisers take, you manage to do your first few metres. You keep moving your knees, stretching and unstretching your legs, you move forward, you turn the handlebar left, you turn left, you turn the right, the bike turns right, you clench the brakes, you stop. You’ve done it!

Suddenly you realise you’ve gone for miles. Unfortunately, you’ve been so focused on the mechanics of how the bike works - the pedalling the turning the braking – that you’ve ended up miles from home and you’re absolutely lost. That’s stage three – you’ve managed to ride, but you’ve been so concentrated on the mechanics that you’ve lost all the context. It takes a call to your parents to get yourself home.

Stage Four
Unconscious Competence

You keep practising, pedalling away, and then one day, without even noticing it, you realise you’re no longer looking at the bike. You don't need the stabilisers. You don’t need to tell your hands to turn the handlebars to turn left – you just look left and somehow the bike follows. You don’t need to brake when you see a red light, your hands are on autopilot and they bring the bike to a gentle stop without you even having to think about it. Now you can go for a ride, enjoy the view, and know where you're going all at the same time. You stop having to think about the bike and look at its mechanics every other second. For a glorious moment you are at one with the machine and in love with the newly accessible world around you that you can now see. That’s stage four.

Unfortunately, the moment doesn’t last long. Your eyes wander and you spot your neighbour – the one who introduced you to the joys of bicycles in the first place. What’s that he’s riding? It’s like a bike… only he doesn’t seem to have to pedal at all!

He’s only gone and bought a motorbike. You realise bicycles are rubbish and with a thump you crash back down to earth and stage one.

So…

That’s a little story to paraphrase the way that we learn according to the four stages of learning. Hopefully it brings to life the reasons why we sometimes feel like our poetry gets worse before it gets better – knowing how to write a haiku doesn’t make us write good haikus. Writing lots and lots of haikus does. It’s only once we’ve gone through the four stages that we can use the techniques that we’ve learnt to serve the real subject of a poem. Before that we tend to use the techniques clunkily, or in a way that’s subconsciously designed to show-off that we know the techniques. It’s only through practice that we learn to use rhetorical devices in the right places without drawing undue attention to them.


Summary

Here’s the dry version of what I’ve just said, for those of you who are yet to experience the joy of learning to ride a bike:

1. Unconscious Incompetence
The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognise their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage.The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.

2. Conscious Incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

3. Conscious Competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.

4. Unconscious Competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

(Taken from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence)


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Daniel



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