The Learning Dialogue Model Simply

How do people learn? More specifically, when introduced to something new, how do people make sense of it?





Orientation in learning is about introducing something new to you in a way that is meaningful to you.


In a classroom, a teacher is concerned with whether her class is ready to learn before beginning the lesson. She knows that attention has to do with more than lack of distraction. It has to do with curiosity and a sense that there is some personal relevancy to the subject for the learner.

Adults in their every day lives, or in their workplace, are evenImage by Getty Images via Daylife more concerned with relevancy when introduced to something new than are children in a classroom. When something new is introduced to you as an adult, whether in the realm of ideas or experiences, it is just as important that you are ready to learn before engaging the learning process as it was when you were a child, even though this is not something that is commonly recognized.

When some new idea, situation or experience is introduced to you, you will not be able to fully make sense of it in its own terms, as well as be able to understand it in the most meaningful terms for someone else, unless you first find it fully meaningful to your own mind.

How do you measure the relevancy of something?  You look for how it is relevant to what you already know or to what you believe you need to know or what you want to know.  These ways of measuring the relevancy for you of something new that is introduced to you actually require quite different thinking processes.

In order to illustrate this, first imagine someone who is introduced to a new subject in a course that they are taking in a university class.  Then imagine someone who finds themselves in a completely new environment, say in a country that they have never been in before.  In the first situation it is easy to imagine someone evaluating the relevancy of the new subject to the last subject or the last lesson, or to the overall knowledge that they had already acquired in the class.  In the second situation the same kind of knowledge base does not exist for the individual.  It is easy, therefore, to imagine the person thinking in associative terms, comparing and contrasting completely new experiences of things with previous experiences of more familiar places.  It is also easy to imagine the person stopping and trying to step outside the frame of the new environment somehow to reflect on it and to go to special vantage points to get a better perspective.