I have posted previously about a working thesis for an article that I am working towards getting published in some sort of Learning Journal or something to the liking. Currently, I am targeting the Military Journal of Learning as it seems the most appropriate for the topic. In addition, it seems like the topic would be applicable outside of my "targeted subject" of Air Force Special Warfare Training" throughout the entire Department of Defense. I have no explicit goal of "airing our dirty laundry" within AFSPECWAR. Instead, my intent is to point out some inefficiencies and archaic practices that we are still using to this day in order to train this highly skilled group of warriors within the USAF.
Working Thesis:
Air Force Special Warfare (AFSPECWAR) training entities can produce more lethal warriors, more efficiently, who are capable of meeting and exceeding the challenges yet to be faced within the changing character of war by adopting modernized training design architectures holistically. The changes needed will abolish antiquated pedagogical practices and accelerate change towards training architectures that support and enhance the performance of these specialized Airmen. A modernized framework would center around several varieties of evidence-based andragogical learning architectures whose primary focus is on end-state performance vice part-task accomplishment. In short, the "check the box" mentality needs to be thrown in the trash so a paradigm shift in training culture can begin within AFSPECWAR.
Literature Review:
Up to this point I have been doing a lot of reading in an effort to complete a somewhat extensive literature review in order to have a foundation of research-based practices to provide to our leadership within Air Education and Training Command (AETC) and other leaders in the various Major Commands (MAJCOM) that have the potential to effect the changes proposed. So, what have I been reading?
I know, there are quite a few here and I can tell you that I have added a ton of information and techniques to try out into my "teaching toolkit" through this journey. But let me give you some highlights from each here:
Sources of Power, 20th Anniversary Edition. Gary Klein. MIT Press. 1999.
Overall, this book was eye opening for me as a guy who has been teaching critical thinking and decision-making in high-stress environments for a long time. The focus on the "why" in your decision-making process doesn't happen in the now or in the present. It actually comes through the post-decision analysis (we refer to that as a debrief in my current circle). Gary Klein wraps up some key principles to how we make decisions in this book:
Experience Counts - if you haven't experienced personally what needs to happen, your process of decision making will be delayed in most cases. Your training matters, so make it as realistic as possible to give your students experiences.
Expertise depends on perceptual skills - most of the experts in this book had no idea why they made the decisions they made or when they thought they knew why they made the decision they used "a feeling" as the primary reason or "a special gift of intuition". When Gary and his team applied analysis to most of these, they found that these experts actually were using their previous experiences (unconsciously) to make the decision. The best example of this was actually a lead firefighter that entered a dwelling with his team. He explained that he had a feeling that something was going to happen and ordered his team out of the room. Moments after his team left, the entire floor, they were on collapsed. When asked why he told his team to get out he explained, "It just didn't feel right". As they dug deeper into this decision-making process, they discovered all of the key elements like "the fire was quieter than other fires I had been in" and "the floor felt soft" and "the heat was not as bad as other fires." The reason the floor collapsed was actually because the fire was in the basement and not in the walls of the floor they were on as they originally believed. The reason why it was quiet, the reason the floor was soft, the reason the heat wasn't as intense as other fires were all because it wasn't where they thought it was. It was actually on the floor below them. However, the reason behind his decision was actually based on his experience in the past, with all of the fires he had been on the scene for. His brain was able to rapidly coalesce all of those experiences and send him down a path of getting everyone out of there! That entire story is still amazing to me!
The computer metaphor of thinking is incomplete - rapidly processing multiple courses of action and considering the outcomes of each of those actions based on how you have stored them in your memory bank while simultaneously being capable of manipulating the various data elements with each of them doesn't explain how an expert makes decisions. While it may be an element it is not the magic potion for rapid decision-making in high-stress environments.
Skilled problem solvers and decision makers are chameleons - they adapt to the environment we are in. They are also adaptive to the people they are around in order to build their experiences and perceptions of problems. In short, they are not only great listeners, but they are also able to synthesize the information rapidly and apply them to various situations and experiences.
Finally, Gary does a fantastic job in explaining that the sources of power for decision-making in most high-stress situations described within, operate in ways that are not analytical:
They are generative - they use the experience as a series of opportunities rather than a filtering process. Basically, a decision is made and then reacted on based on the outcome of that decision as many times as it is needed to complete the task at hand.
The goal changes as the decision-maker makes decisions and that is okay.
Speed > Accuracy and this means that errors are accepted on a mitigated scale.
Decisions build experience and add to their collection of future decisions based on the stories
Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown and Company. 2005
I actually read Blink before reading Sources of Power. Malcolm was the book that got me thinking about how we train our Airmen actually. The thought process, backed with neuroscience and psychology, within this text are earthshattering in terms of really thinking about how we view the world. Malcolm explains in his text that your brain is actually processing a ton of information in a single moment of time than you are actually aware of. The theory he calls "thin-slicing" is used throughout the text and it explains what your body is unconsciously doing in a moment that effects your decision-making process and your actual physical response to a situation. Often times, you have no idea what your brain is doing in these situations. Ever get that "hair on the back of your neck standing up" feeling? Malcolm explains a lot of that in this book.
The environment we surround ourselves with and the education we receive on things, including the undertones of those instructions, are all used by our subconscious to make split-second decisions in the end. Do you think that race isn't something that you consider in your decision-making process? Malcolm hits some very, what may be considered, uncomfortable topics with this very subject (check out chapter 3).
The biggest thing I took away from this book is summed up with this quote: "We need to respect the fact that sometimes it is okay to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way."
In addition to learning a new way of thinking about our subconscious thought process, it was also nice to see some relevant data about high-stress reactions the body and brain has as well. Malcolm details out some police officer involved shootings from the police officers' accounts. There are details in here on the "tunnel vision" and "extreme focus" and "heightened sense of awareness" to the point of one officer even saying he "watched the bullets hit the person". Thinking back to some of my own experiences I related very well to this, but the science behind it was extremely intuitive and thought provoking. It helped me realize that our brains are extremely complex processors that are there to save your life in some cases by getting rid of useless processes in high stress like "peripheral sounds" and feeling in different parts of your body. He even touches on a familiar text "On Killing" where the heightened arousal theory is introduced where the optimal stress-level, expressed in heartrate, for the combat environment, was found to be between 115-145 BPM. Heartrates above 145 BPM were areas where bad decisions were made, and the individuals usually became inappropriately aggressive.
Relating that all back to training, where I have a stance that training matters, we have to think about the physical reactions of our students in these scenarios and experiences as well. We need to think about and use the science to allow our students to maintain their optimal arousal zones in high-stress situations. So, the questions came up about how we monitor that and what other resources do we need to help interpret that data?
Thinking, Fast, and Slow. Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011.
Wow, talk about a detailed analysis of how to debrief! Daniel breaks down the language we use and refers to it throughout the text as our "watercooler gossip." The accounts and experiences used throughout this book are extremely detailed and inspiring. They forced me to take a look back at how the people around you form an opinion on a subject or even a person based on their own experiences instead of your own experiences.
Daniel takes it quite a few steps further however, with a complete breakdown of breaking down those conversations to see the different viewpoints and heuristics of the conversations that are happening. This all culminates in understanding how decisions are made instead of looking at how the decision that was made turned out... check that statement out one more time for me.
The hope is that you are a methodical enough decision-maker that you trust your watercooler gossipers are going to judge the "how" versus the "what' in a decision.
Human Performance Enhancement in High-Risk Environments. Paul E. O'Conner and Joseph V Cohn. Library of Congress. 2010
When looking at how we are currently doing high-risk training in the USAF I thought it was a good idea to look at how we have completed it over time in the US Military and wanted to see if there was already data produced on the same subject. As it turns out, there is a whole book that placed a lot of data-based research on the same topic! This book is broken into 6-sections that explain the overall human-performance research advancements in the US Military from how we select individuals for high-risk jobs, how we train them, how we ensure we are being safe with the training and finally how we design training programs for the high-risk jobs.
From a historical perspective and to ensure I wasn't just repeating something that others already researched and wrote about. This book gives a good look at where we have come from and even where we are going with technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality.
Have you ever thought about why the cockpit in a jet is laid out the way it is? Well, there is an entire research report on it in this book.
Building Expertise. Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement. Ruth Colvin Clark. John, Wiley & Sons. 2008.
In my first semester at Boise State as part of the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL) program, I read this book. Then, I built an entire class on it's practices while I was at the Weapons School teaching and even wrote a white paper using a lot of its practices that can be found in my professional portfolio (www.johnrobertson.info) if you are interested.
If you want a foundation for what it takes to build an expert, this entire text lays that out for you to help build a useful framework.
Human Performance Improvement. Building Practitioner Competence. William Rothwell, Carolyn Hohne, and Stephen King. Gulf Publishing Company. 2000.
This has been my guiding light while working through my graduate program at Boise State. It again, is a foundational text that I often reference back to for different areas of Human Performance Improvement (HPI). I use this book as my doctrine document for HPI actually. It helps me figure out the scaffolding for analysis, intervention methods, change management, evaluation, trend data compilation and so much more.
While it has been a minute since I have read this book cover-to-cover (probably that first semester again) it is one that I keep close by and refer to when I am formulating responses and trying to help figure out some training consultation.
Telling Ain't Training, 2nd Edition. Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps. American Society for Training Development. 2011.
Here is another one of my doctrine documents much like HPI above. This book's layout is like a workbook format for me and the amount of notes I have in the margins of this are crazy! I have used the principles to design entire training programs and make sure that I teach these methods to new instructors. Honestly, the title says it all. Telling is not actually training anything. You can get up in front of a group of students and tell them something all day long. It isn't until your story is structured in a manner that invokes an emotional and cognitive thought process that you are actually training them. The authors do a fantastic job of dispelling myths and rumors about good training. For example, how many times have you been told that "using multiple forms of media to relay your content results in highly-effective learning for your students?" I for one, have been instructed this by the USAF themselves as part of Air Combat Command's Classroom Instruction Course. On the contrary, the data suggest that this form of presentation can actually overwhelm more learners' processing capabilities of the data itself instead of enhance it.
The major distinction here is nested in spatially and temporally integrated multisensory input versus mixtures of not-well connected audiovisual (and other) sensory inputs. What that really means is that when you just put pictures and video clips in your instruction that have nothing to do with the data that is being presented, it just distracts the learner versus an intentional and methodical reasoning for the visual that you are presenting. Have you ever seen a slide that has some random bad-ass picture of some crazy explosion and a guy in a firefight, but the context of the data is about organizing your thoughts to put together a presentation for a student? See how that can be distracting?
Alright, so that is a lot of reading that has been done so far... but what am I doing now? Well step 1 was actually getting my thoughts down about the various books that I have read and the ones that I commonly use to help develop training programs. Now I need to get those pieces and parts organized into some sort of methodical presentation to argue back towards my thesis of correcting the training culture and process for AFSPECWAR.
So far, that outline looks something like:
- Intro with problem/thesis statement
-- Define the end-state
- Give the current state and background
- Give the Detailed Fix
-- Use the literature to support the fixes identified
- Wrap it all up with a challenge to leadership and the field to change the culture or challenge it
Looking at the Journal of Military Learning gives me somewhere between 3000 and 5000 words to get this all done. I think that is 100% doable in this case.
I am interested in what peers and colleagues think of the idea so far though...
Comments