How does it Overlap with Learning and Education?
Society and professional knowledge often dampens our innate curiosity.
Children are curious about the world. They ask endless questions about how it works and constantly ask the question, why?
As you get older, society drums this out of you. In school, everyone follows the same curriculum, universities feed us core information in relation to a topic and as a professional group, you acquire competency in a role.
I would argue, we have become compliant learners and have no time to practice curiosity. Rather, we are designed for productivity and routine not curiosity and exploration.
When you replace curiosity with compliance you lose your creativity.
Mandatory and statutory training are organisational requirements for learning and the modules which we are expected to undertake is increasing. This is often due to the need to cover the recommendations of the mistakes of the past acting as tick boxes rather than true understanding.
Our competency frameworks attempt to describe job roles and tailor critical knowledge, skills and behaviours to be safe and effective practitioners but fail to stimulate innovation.
Success may be seen in the simulation play drill of Basic Life Support and Intermediate Life Support. This is when it is not delegated to an e-learning package. When scared and adrenaline pumps round our bodies, the ability to still remember how to call for help and do chest compressions from our deep memory is life saving.
Critical skills will need to be taught and other specific knowledge, skills and behaviours may need more traditional teaching methods but there is a balance to be struck between competency and encouraging creativity, adaptability and curiosity.
Following our genuine personal curiosity must be a better foundation for career building than following what has been laid out before us, albeit safety and risk need to managed, skills demonstrated and capability to undertake roles effectively important.
Our workforce strategy, due to shortages of people, have new roles evolving to meet gaps, staff are rapidly promoted and loss of experienced practitioners is apparent. When time and exposure to events builds our intuition, how are we creating wisdom in our systems.
We need Time to be Curious
If we are busy with the tasks of the day, the constant background chatter of social media and do not create any times free of routine to find those curious moments, when will true learning occur.
When People are Curious to Learn the Answer to a Question, they Remember More
Researchers discovered a connection between memory and curiosity levels. There key findings were that participants had greater recall of unrelated, extraneous or incidental information present at the time when people were curious. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/curiosity-helps-learning-and-memory
Scans revealed when people were more curious, brain activity rose in regions associated with memory and reward. When we are curious, we are open-minded and learning feels positive and we remember more.
When we are rote learning and undertaking facts acquisition, curiosity is low, we become task orientated, unstimulated and closed to inspiration.
What is the impact when we roll out mandatory and statutory training or competency frameworks for roles without creating curiosity. We will only acquire the minimal information and are highly unlikely to create true understanding or be able to apply our new knowledge to different situations.
When Faced with Something New, Our Brain Weighs the Risks and Rewards
It is human nature to ask the question – Is this worth my time?
If the world feels risky, you close down learning something new in favour of the status quo and as we tend to see new knowledge as a threat, we are therefore naturally closed from curiosity as adults.
We therefore need to practice curiosity.
When was the last time we discovered something new in our favourite topic? If we are not learning every day, we need to appreciate that our experience of education is hampering our ability to be agile, flexible and change.
Interestingly, people who are curious, have increased patience as when you practice curiosity, the answers are not immediately available and we have to wait.
If people are closed to learning, we remain in our bubble of custom and practice but are rapid decision makers wanting to jump straight to the answers.
Practicing Curiosity: The Internet Is Your Personal Curiosity Machine.
Whatever you’re curious about, the internet has an answer and now we have Open Source AI, which is amazing. In creating this blog, I conversed with AI to explore this topic and although have written my own conclusions, had a fun weekend acquiring new skills.
Our technology may not always identify the right answer, but with exploration and some critical thinking, you can learn almost anything and it’s open 24/7/365.
It is not the means of education or the means of learning that are scarce, but the desire (or time) to learn that is lacking.
People with a growth mindset have a desire to explore, learn and understand – they are curious.
This requires:
- Self-awareness to be able to critically evaluate ourselves.
- Tenacity to be determined to pursue and explore information, verifying it to ascertain its validity.
- Active listening and asking questions recognising the unique experience of others and their wisdom which we can learn from.
- Situational awareness and appreciation of context to frame out thinking.
- Being analytical and utilising critical thinking skills.
- Using our imagination to explore the ‘what if?’ and ‘think forward’.
All of these correlate to the purpose of continuing professional development
Learning Journeys should be Built from Curiosity
Self-determined learners have self-initiative and motivation and through reflection and reflexivity, they become masters of their subject.
They can identify their own learning goals, identify resources for learning that meet their own learning style and create personal learning pathways.
Group and connection with others is critical to gain self esteem, social communication and different perspectives.
Our workforces need to create a learning community and curiosity must be a critical feature of this.
Our Curiosity Approach
Organisations should review their Curiosity Approach and consider using models of supervision, distributed wisdom and other mechanisms to create curiosity to meet our future system needs.
Nurture Health and Care Ltd has developed a new model of supervision to bridge this gap and make curiosity a learning outcome, with generation of your own learning strategy to identify mechanisms of managing complexity, risk and uncertainty alongside restorative approaches.
We should all seek to have a light bulb moment where we changed our behaviour, thoughts or a belief and came to a new conclusion.
