Self-Management and Experiential Learning

1. Self Management Project MGT 494 Lecture-7

2. Recap • Teaching versus Learning • The Learning Process • Auditory • Visual • Kinesthetic • Self-Assessments

3. Teaching versus Learning • Can some one teach self-management skills? • Rather, people learn them • Look at how a child learns to ride a two-wheel bicycle. The operative word here is learn • A child learns to ride a bicycle by first riding with training wheels. Then you remove the training wheels and hold on to the back of the seat for a bit, but before the child can learn how to balance and control the bike, you must let go and let her struggle to stay upright. She will fall, get injured and scraped, but she will learn how to ride the bike.

4. Old Parable • An old parable says give a starving person a fish, you feed him for just one day, but teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. • However, self-management assume that teaching the person how to fish does not feed him for a lifetime. Instead, it gives him just the opportunity to do so. • Whether or not the person takes advantage of the opportunity is a matter of personal choice. • Choosing from among personal goals and exercising self-management determines whether or not the person will ever use the knowledge and the skill he has for fishing.

5. The Learning Process • Textbooks describe three basic methods of learning: • auditory (listening, hearing) • visual (seeing, taking in) • kinesthetic (feeling, handling). • People learn through one of those modalities or through some combination of them. • Some people enjoy listening to lectures and absorb much more from them than others. • I am a university teacher, I conducted studies on self-directed learning and found that business majors learn more effectively this way; they prefer to learn from lectures tied directly to a reading or to crib notes.

6. Today’s Lecture • Experiential Learning and Self-Management • The EIAG Model

7. Experiential Learning and Self-Management • Since self-management skills can't be learned from books or from a computer, self-management training, especially when interpersonal relations are involved, works best in a classroom- or group-based, facilitated (instructor-led) program. • First, people can't learn much about themselves by merely looking in a mirror. Self-assessments are helpful, not definitive. • What they see and what other people see usually deviates considerably. They need feedback from others about what they think or feel before they can get a complete image of themselves.

8. Experiential Learning and Self-Management • Second, since self-managed people live and work in a world with other people, they need to practice interpersonal relations skills. • For a person to understand relationships and to learn how to manage themselves in those relationships, they have to experience them and practice what to do when they run into a variety of challenging situations. • Just reading about them won't do. People have to manipulate the information and practice the instructions they receive to make self-management skills work for them.

9. Experiential Learning and Self-Management • Third, to have successful learning experiences, your students will need other people to explain how they respond to what the students say or do and why they responded that way. • Feedback from peers as well as feedback from the classroom leader carry a great deal of weight

10. Experience-based learning • In experience-based learning, the subject matter experts are the participants in sofar as only they can tell you what they think or feel about anything that affects them, their thoughts or feelings • In an interactive exercise, students test their self-management skills, such as assertive communication. • They also test your recommendations for what is effective or ineffective. Only by practicing and testing can a person become an expert.

11. Confucius (551–479 BC) • All this reflects the aphorism attributed to Confucius: "Tell me, and I hear; show me, and I see; let me do, and I understand." • Confucius understood that for us to learn how to do something, we must do it, which would make him the first advocate of experiential learning. • Since managing ourselves, especially in our interpersonal relations, requires behavioral skills and are things we do for and to ourselves and for and with other people, self-management skills are best learned through experience in a group setting. • Doing may involve some falling off the bike, some trial-and-error, some mistakes or misjudgments, some struggle, but all that experience reinforces the learning and helps us internalize what we're learning, especially when it comes to learning about our own emotions or feelings, which, along with knowledge, are the critical "stuff" of self-management.

12. The EIAG Model • The Experience, Interpretation, Analysis, and Generalization (EIAG) Model (which implements the Confucian vision at several levels cognitive, affective, and moral) describes the implicit structure of the exercises in a self-management • This relatively old model consists of learning through a circular process of Experience, Interpretation, Analysis, and Generalization • The goal of this learning model is to help people fully understand how (and how well) they control their lives.

13. Experience and Description • Step one of any experiential learning model requires that the students learn by doing, which includes having an experience and describing that experience in the most objective terms possible. • People can only remember and interpret the experience in terms of their values, feelings, emotions, and attitudes; therefore, it's important for individual to separate the content, the bare experience, from their emotions, feelings, values, and attitudes • For example, a student says, "The employee asked me to justify my decision.“ This reflects the cognitive aspect of the experience.

14. Interpretation • After describing the experience as objectively as they can, students look at what they think of and how they feel about what happened. • In this second step of the model, it's important for students to surface their values, feelings, emotions, and attitudes, which define and color experience. • The definitions and shadings often take on the form of biases, which, especially if kept below the surface, can interfere with people's ability to manage themselves and the relationships they have with others. The students ask: "What did I like about it?" "What didn't I like?" "What worked?" ''What didn't work?"

15. Analysis • After a student describes what happened objectively and expresses his interpretation, he then analyzes the experience • In this third step, students question why they responded as they did. • The students analyze what happened • Why did I think that? • Why don't I like having my decisions or my authority questioned? • Why did she question my decision? • Have people questioned my decisions or authority before? • If so, how did I react and why?" Answers to those questions lead to a better understanding of the situation. • Answers to those questions when they're discussed with a trusted group, including, leads to fuller understanding of how (and how well) he or she controls his or her life. That is, of course, the goal of this learning model.

16. Generalization • The answers to analytic questions help the students to look forward and to talk about what they plan to do in the future: a desired behavior. • The fictitious student might say, "Knowing what I now know about myself, knowing how and why I react the way I do when someone questions my decisions or authority, • what can I do to change those ineffective reactions or to repeat those that are useful or productive? • What would I do differently and what could I expect from the change?" • Follow-up activities, with clearly identified goals and steps for accomplishing them, provide a method for applying what the students learn from the experience.

17. Summary • Experiential Learning and Self-Management • The EIAG Model

18. Next Lecture • Two Experiential Learning Tools • Role Playing • Being Myself • THE PYRAMID OF CONTROL