Chapter 6 – Integrator
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6.5 Learning From Experience (adapted from Dick & Dalmau, 1999, pp. 229–247)
(click the activity index number to take you back to the activities index)
An important function of the Integrator role is your ability to find ways to better utilise the
knowledge you have gained from previous experiences as an Academic Coordinator in
new contexts.
OBJECTIVE
To learn from a difficult or challenging event related to your
work as an Academic Coordinator.In all areas of work and life, we must be increasingly responsive to change, flexible
and able to ‘learn on the job’. There is an old adage that experience is the best teacher,
but we know that some people learn more quickly and more effectively from experience
than do others. Reflection is a very important but often overlooked part of the process of
learning from experience which has been a focus of other activities such as “Developing
Reflection Skills”. But how often do we take time out to stop and think through in detail
what happened at a particular time? It is often difficult to make the time to systematically
pull apart an event that did not go as we would have liked, to try to make sense of it –
and to learn from the experience. This activity takes you through a process which will
help you to step back from an experience related to your work as Academic Coordinator,
to deliberately and carefully review it and to draw inferences from what happened that
will be of assistance to you in the future.
Activity
This activity may be done individually or with another person or persons that you trust.
Step 1
Think back to an event related to your work as Academic Coordinator which you found
difficult or challenging in some significant way and which you would like to handle
differently if it were to happen again. It needs to be an event where you realise that the
dissatisfaction that you now experience with this event is largely due to you in some way
and not due to the behaviour or actions of others.
It may be a time when you experienced yourself as:
- less effective than you believe you could have been;
- less than satisfied with what happened; or
- perhaps did something which you now view as unhelpful to yourself or other people.
If you choose a trivial event you will learn less from it. If you choose an event where you
know (or have a strong hunch) that an essential part of the dissatisfaction was due to
your own behaviour in some way, then your learning is likely to be quite substantial.