Lifelong learning: how can we reflect and improve from the situations we face?
When we begin in the world of work, it is very easy to breathe a sigh of relief that we no longer have formal lectures to attend and stressful exams to revise for and complete.
The world of work can feel like somewhat of a break – we can turn up, do our jobs and not worry about quizzes and consistent reflection on our learning. Not every situation we face in life has to be analysed to the nth degree and reflected on for a university demanded reflection log, right?
Unfortunately, the world of work shifts us to our next type of learning. The leap from A-levels to university-level learning is difficult, but the jump to the world of work is a further jump yet.
There is likely to be only very limited input from your employer, and no one chasing you up to do any reflection. However, without reflection, how are you going to learn from your successes and your failures? How are you going to become a better vet? How are you going to identify areas that you need to work on, address these weaknesses and grow professionally?
Unfortunately, this is lifelong learning, and it has to be driven by you.
Fortunately, this article will give you an insight into lifelong learning from a different perspective; how the brain works. This article will explore the purpose of lifelong learning, and the processes that go on in our brain to drive this forward. What are they, and how can we make them more efficient?
What is lifelong learning?
Lifelong learning is the process by which we continue to drive forward our own learning during our profession careers, without necessarily having input from others. Depending on where you work, your employer may provide support, but generally, you will be the driver of your own learning.
In practice, this means that you need to be in control of identifying your areas of strength and areas of improvement. You also need to be the one driving forward your own training opportunities, whether this may be shadowing a more experienced other, attending external training or taking on different types of appointment so that you are able to consistently work on an area of weakness.
Why does lifelong learning matter?
In short, without considering your strengths and areas for improvement, and without working on the latter, you aren’t going to improve in your day-to-day role. The level you are at when you leave university will be the level that you remain at.
This may seem ridiculous – of course you are going to improve, right? You will, but only for one of two reasons. Either you do manage your own learning (even if this is subconscious), or there will be a member of staff in your veterinary practice who helps to drive forward your development.
Progress won’t happen naturally, unless it is being driven forward. Additionally, the most effective way to drive it forward is through ensuring that it is a conscious process. As noted already, sometimes this process is subconscious.
At the end of the day, you will have gone through very many years of education by the time you are working
full-time, and so you will have developed strategies that you use to drive forward your own development. These strategies will be so automatic that they become subconscious. However, if we are able to make these thoughts and actions conscious, then your progress will accelerate.
Another reason to care is our human nature. An indisputable fact of our own nature is that we like to be doing well. Sometimes we pretend that we don’t, but everyone likes getting better, knowing the answer, finding the solution and receiving positive praise.
We’re lying to ourselves if we reject this notion. Therefore, taking control of your own lifelong learning ensures continuous progress, fulfilling our own innate needs to improve and succeed.
What is the learning process?
To be able to drive forward our own learning, we need to understand how the learning process, or even the reflection cycle, occurs. Reflection is the ability to self-review how a task has gone, and then deduce learning aims for future activities, to drive forward our own development.
Firstly, we need to be able to successfully reflect on how well something has gone. To be able to do this, we need to be precise in what a successful outcome looks like, so that after we have completed the task, we are able to accurately compare how something has gone, as compared to those aims.
The differences we have between our outcomes and the desired outcomes provide us with evaluation that we can then use going forwards.
Another consideration that we have is that accurate feedback typically only occurs where we really understand the topic matter at hand. If we are ignorant of what a successful outcome really looks like (even if we understand the aims), then our own self-evaluation is going to be inaccurate, and it won’t help us in our
own reflections.
Therefore, we need to be clear on what the very best outcomes and performances look like. We need to be continuing reading around a topic area and gaining experiences with expert others. This may take the form of speaking to colleagues or watching them in surgery.
Gaining this information means we are better able to quality assurance our own evaluations and hence improve our own reflections.
If we follow these stages, we will consistently be able to evaluate what is going well in our work, and the areas that we need to be improving on, allowing us to develop our own aims for future progress.
This is the hardest process in lifelong learning – effective identification of strengths, weaknesses, and future aims. There is a cheat code, however, to make this even more successful, and it’s called metacognition.
Why does metacognition matter?
Metacognition is, in short, the evaluation our own cognition. In layman’s terms, this is the process of evaluation (and discussed already), but also the process of planning and monitoring our own activities. It also includes our own knowledge of cognition, a fundamental to successful lifelong learning.
So far, we have explored reflection. The identification of strengths, weaknesses and aims is imperative to successful lifelong learning, but if this information isn’t used (in effect, if it becomes static), then it is wasted.
Improvement comes from acting on the factors identified, and not just the identifying. Therefore, evaluation needs to become active. The way we can do this is through the regulation of cognition cycle, which I have outlined below.
- Reflection – the process by which you identify your own strengths and areas for improvement. You also consider how successful different approaches may have been (for example, a side flank or midline incision in a spay), when these different approaches are best used, and take on board any feedback from colleagues.
- Planning – this is the process by which you determine how to go about completing a task, based on the previously determined reflection stage. This is where reflection moves from being static into becoming active. In this stage, we would plan how to complete an activity (going back to the example, which way we may make an incision), but we would also take on board the reflection that has occurred in the previous stage. This should make our outcomes better this time around, even if it is just marginal (and if it doesn’t, our future reflection should improve our knowledge and understanding yet further, anyway).
- Monitoring – this is the “sticky middle” between the planning and reflection stages. If we like, we don’t have to monitor – we can just wait until the end of the (cognitive) task to evaluate how well we have done. However, monitoring provides us with the opportunity to do mini-points of reflection during an activity, to ensure that the resulting outcome is better than if we had just waited until the end point to do any reflection at all. This may include considering if everything is going to track, if we need any help, if we need to try a different stitch etc. For example, if we first used a simple interrupted pattern stitch to close up an incision, but we could see it wasn’t holding, we wouldn’t wait until postop to correct this. Instead, we would immediately attempt to resolve the situation by, for example, using a continuous pattern stitch.
If we consistently go through this metacognitive cycle, we are going to see significant improvements in our own performance, and high-quality lifelong learning. This process is also going to open up the identification of areas that we need to work on. In the world of metacognition (your cheat code to effective lifelong learning, remember), there is an area called knowledge of cognition.
What do we need to consider?
Our knowledge of cognition is crucial to driving forward effective lifelong learning. This knowledge of cognition term covers our own understanding of what we are being asked to do, the ways in which we can do it and the knowledge we have to be able to successfully do it. Let me break that down a little more…
- Knowledge of task – our own understanding of what exactly we are needing to do. Sometimes this may be a simple spay, but, on other occasions, there may be complications to a certain case that need to be understood before diving into surgery.
- Knowledge of self – what (relevant) knowledge do I have that will support me in conducting this surgery? Are there drugs mentioned that I don’t know the effects of, for example? Or perhaps you have recently read up on a case study that is identical to the symptoms a patient is showing, and so you are confident in understanding what the potential complications may be and how to cope with them.
- Knowledge of strategies – there is always more than one way to skin a cat (pardon the pun), but it is true. Most vets have different ways of doing things, from the knots that they use to the drug that they may favour. Over time, you will develop strategies that you are more comfortable with using. However, there will be times where alternative strategies are more appropriate, even if you are less comfortable using them. You need to identify these occasions, and not plough on with an inappropriate strategy just because you are more comfortable using that approach.
Although this cycle may appear quite abstract and removed from the work that you are doing, all of your reflection will, in some way, fall into these three categories. Have you identified that your strategy knowledge is weak? Do you need to identify and practise alternative approaches? Perhaps you need to address your knowledge of self and improve your knowledge of alternative drugs available to use? Or perhaps you have misdiagnosed a few patients, and actually need to look up combinations of symptoms and talk them through with a more experienced other?
Whatever it may be, you can now understand your learning process. During a task, you will need to compare the results to the aims and use this to identify foci for future. You also need to use this reflection to inform future planning and use monitoring opportunities to improve outcomes. You also need to consider your knowledge of task, self and strategies to identify what areas it is you are struggling on and need to work on the most.
The beauty of these approaches is that they are cycles. You can use them to support your improvement when in the first year of working, and the fiftieth. They provide simple, sure-fire ways to drive forward your lifelong learning.
Nathan Burns
Nathan is an expert in the area of revision, effective learning and metacognition. He supports schools and universities across the UK in developing effective learners.
He has published two books on the area of metacognition, and written extensively for publications such as Oxford University Press, Schools Week and First News. He can be found on X at MrMetacognition, LinkedIn as Nathan Burns and through his website, www.mrmetacognition.com