The Teaching and Learning Process
Gagne suggested an eight –stage model of learning involving:
1. Motivation and Expectancy;
2. Attention and Selective perception;
3. Acquisition, Coding and Storage of new components of learning;
4. Retention and Storage in long term memory;
5. Retrieval and Recall;
6. Generalization and Transfer;
7. Performance Aspects;
8. Feedback and Reinforcement.
The model is clearly useful, focusing as it does strongly upon the ability to memorize, codify and recall information; though it tends to present this complex process as if it occurred linearly and in a rather simplified manner.
Within the context of professional education, this process may be described.
During the complex processes of interaction involving patients and clients, caregivers accumulate a wide range of experiences, which they bring with them to every new learning situation.
Memories….influence the interpretations placed upon experience, since they are individual and personal. Perception of the situation is largely determined by individual biography.
Learning is the process of transforming that present experience into knowledge, skills, attitudes, values and emotions.
It is a matter, therefore, of modifying the individual biography, which in its turn will affect the manner in which future situations are experienced.
What is being described here is essentially a process of Reflective Learning. In this, the role of practioner is a reflection upon unique and individual experience has potentially more creative aspects. It encourages the individual to examine the implications of a shared practice base forming the foundation of his/her professional armamentarium (i.e., Shared Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes), within the unique and individual context of personal professional experience. In this way, modes of thinking which may have become received and habitual; rationales which may be been embraced relatively uncritically and non-reflectively; and treatment patterns which may have become “Second Nature”, are exposed to critical self-review, which is an all-important precursor to the development and improvement of individual practice.
It was with the intension of stimulating such personal reflective learning, within the context and security of familiar practice and empathic discussion that the educational intervention strategy used in the present study was formulated.
