One Apple A Day #537 - it starts from not knowing
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —Josh Billings
Yes, it happened to me many times. It still happens. Let's be honest, when reality doesn't fit with what we know for sure, it's more comfortable to lie to ourselves than challenge our truth.
The world is full of opportunities to learn and grow. But you'll never begin a learning process unless you become aware and accept what you don't know.
On the 20th February 1969, Martin M. Broadwell published on "The Gospel Guardian" the 17th and last part of a series titled "Teaching For Learning". In his article, Broadwell introduced a new learning model that he labelled "the four levels of teaching". Or, how it is often called "the four stages of competence". The founding idea of the model is that we 'can't being a learning journey if we are unaware of what or how much we know. He calls this first state of being unaware of not knowing the "unconscious incompetence" state. As we progress with our learning, we go through four psychological states until we reach the last one; the "unconscious competence" stage.
Let's take a look at the four stages.
Unconscious incompetence: at this stage, we don't know how to do something, and we don't recognise the deficit. Only when we become aware and accept our incompetence, we can move forward and start a learning process.
Conscious incompetence: at this stage, we recognise our deficit, and we start the learning process to address that gap. Rules, forms and imitation are essential to building the competence we need.
Conscious competence: we have finally acquired the skills we wanted, but to use them, we must be deliberate in our actions. The newly acquired skills may be now easy to use, but they require attention and for us to be conscious. Being conscious of how we use our capabilities allow us to go deeper and integrate the new behaviours in our identity. We are shifting from Doing to Being.
Unconscious competence: finally, what we have learned become "second nature". The new skills become part of our identity. We don't do them anymore, they are integral to who we are.