TransLearn Associates is a higher education and business training consultancy specializing in transfer of learning, leading to what is call leveraged learning. The innovative uniqueness of TransLearn Associates is making transfer of learning the foundation of its instructional and curriculum design. This means that each specific instructional area is designed around eleven practical transfer of learning principles. TransLearn Associates prides itself on a no-nonsense and no trendy shortcuts approach emphasizing transferable core skills, systems and generic thinking. Robert E. Haskell, Ph.D. Director. Transfer of learning involves the problem of how previous learning influences current and future learning and how past or current learning is applied or adapted to similar or new situations so we don't have to constantly learn anew each situation we encounter. Learning organizations and intellectual capital, along with transfer, are joined at the hip. This book will practice what it preaches: It will demonstrate transfer of learning in the act of explaining it. In the more modern vernacular, it will 'walk the talk.' With an increasingly diverse workforce, it's important to begin to understand the influence of culture on learning and transfer. It's useful to see each gender and ethnic group as like a separate culture with its unique evolutionary characteristics, cultural norms, and different ways of knowing that affect transfer. As organizations flatten their hierarchies, as they become more learning oriented, as they increasingly work in groups and cross-functional teams made up of members from different parts of the organization, transfer and mental models become more important as a tool for understanding and communicating with others. Those individuals and organizations who develop transfer abilities will be the ones who will be able to best adapt, compete, and survive. Clearly, much of the information about HRD training effectiveness belongs more to the category of folklore than to valid knowledge. Can your business continue to afford this? Many training programs not only advertise positive outcomes; there are an increasing number of what can be called 'miracle methods,' programs offering not only positive outcomes but nearly instant transfer success, all with an added bonus of a high entertainment quotient thrown in for higher smile sheet scores. The demands of our modern civilization make transfer increasingly important. In slow-changing traditional societies, there is much less need for transfer of learning. In our highly complex, ever-changing society, the ability to transfer or generalize from the familiar to the less familiar not only renders our world predictable and understandable but is a necessity for our personal, social, and economic adaptation. To the extent that individuals can perceive similarities among jobs and are able to effectively transfer their knowledge and skills is the extent to which the time and costs in training or retraining are drastically reduced, reflecting cost savings to employers. A central problem in reengineering corporate training involves an important distinction. That distinction is between training and learning. It is learning in the workplace that is of crucial significance to transfer performance, not training. And it's this distinction that distinguishes the industrial age organization from the information age organization. Instruction for the transfer of training is not the same as instruction for the transfer of learning. Quite frankly--and it hurts to say this--I don't see academia adapting to the HRD support systems model of transfer that I outline in Chapters 7 and 8 any time soon. It's in the corporate university that the promise of transfer will likely be fulfilled, at least on an applied level. The human resource literature with its many anecdotal tales of the wisdom of teams is nearly legendary. Very little of it, however, is based on solid evidence (see Chapter 1). We need what might be termed transfer or conversion engineers. A conversion engineer is anyone with the skills and the intellectual capital to transfer knowledge in the service of technological, industrial, and defense conversion, creating new products and economic markets. Conversion engineers may be found almost anywhere. Like inventors, they need not be formally educated. In fact, sometimes formally acquired expertise may be a liability. At no time in history have we been required to process the amount of information that we do today. But the mind doesn't generally work that way. The brain is an old and wise organ that has its own evolutionary reasons for functioning the way it does. There is an evolutionary lag between the development of our brain and our current need to process information. There exists no known instant learning methods that have been proven effective by rigorous evaluation research to learn or to transfer information. Transfer is a way to shorten this lag. Virtually overlooked in the HRD training field is knowledge of history. I'm not talking world history here; I'm talking business history. In HRD training, there is considerable reinventing of wheels--and often inferior ones. In many of the books on teams and team building, for example, there is a lack of years of pragmatic research on all aspects of small groups in psychology, sociology, education, communication, and other fields. Much of the literature on corporate teams is the small group reinvented--and often not reinvented very well. How is transferable knowledge base acquired? As unpopular as it may be, the answer is: over a long period of time, repetitive practice and drill. And lots of it. People who are good at thinking with strategies are not good at thinking because of the nature of the strategies themselves; they are good at thinking with strategies because of their general knowledge base. At this point, let me briefly state what I will be suggesting about the unconscious and intuition. First, both ideas are based on considerable research; second, many claims for both have been exaggerated; third, both concepts depend on a high level of knowledge base; and fourth, transfer figures prominently into their functioning. In short, does intuition work? The answer is yes and no, and it depends. Sorry. Reality isn'tthat simple. Promises of learning and long-term benefits, then, can be like black holes, sucking in all available instructional resources within their gravitational reach and never emerging into a future performance universe. Such instructional trekking--however enjoyable--may lead to exploring deep intellectual space where no one has gone before, but its return on transfer of learning performance will be earthbound. The primary problem of transfer is accessing the linkages that connect material. In addition to the eleven general principles that I've outline above and throughout this book, there are specific methods to facilitate transfer.

 
 

TransLearn Associates
Robert E. Haskell, Ph.D.

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TransLearn Associates TransLearn Associates is an educational and business training consultancy specializing in transfer of learning, leading to what we call leveraged learning.

The innovative uniqueness of TransLearn Associates is making transfer of training the foundation of its consultancy. This means that each specific instructional area is designed around transfer of learning principles.

TransLearn Associates is committed to strategic and leveraged learning based on firm research findings. On the basis of this experience and roots in the 93 years of research on Transfer of Learning and Training, we know that there are no trendy shortcuts to learning and effective training programs.

   Robert E. Haskell. (February 2001). Deep listening: Uncovering hidden meaning in conversation.  Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

   Robert E. Haskell. (2000). Transfer of Learning: Cognition, Instruction and Reasoning.  Academic Press.

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