RAOC Gazette - page 106
Image details
| Corps | RAOC |
|---|---|
| Material type | Journals |
| Book page | |
| Chapter head | |
| Chapter key | |
| Chapter number | |
| Full title | RAOC Gazette |
| Page number | |
| Publication date | 1968 |
| Real page | |
| Colour | No |
| Grey | No |
| Early date | 1968 |
| Late date | 1968 |
| Transcription |
^Flanagan's Critical incident By LIEUTENANT-COLONEL C. C. PITTAM IT ALL has something to do with Skinner's pigeons, KOR and Mellor's loop. Romantics like myself will already be off around their own loops, where Flanagan, a sort of Samuel Beckett Irish tramp, wanders aimlessly around Trafalgar Square, accom- panied by his dumb stooge K.OR, being submitted to indignities by flocks of pigeons. And Mellors, wasn't he Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper? And so on . . . . . . . . . . . , This is the stuff where- of dreams are made. But alas for the romancers, the names I have carelessly scattered are the OK cries in the field of educa- tion and Brigadier J. F. M. Mellor,—may he forgive me,—is the Director of Technical Training. What is it all about then? It seems that we are having a technological explosion, when the rate of advance is increasing in geometric progression, and the Army, among others, is struggling to keep pace. One views these explosions with suspicion. We have nuclear ones and population ones as well and I am not at all sure that mankind as a whole is advancing in any form of progression. Progress, if at all, is on a narrow band. In fact, one of the educationists' cries is *' Let us get back to Socrates and the tutor-pupil relationship " or to the heuristic method of education by discovery (Archimedes). This is what educational technology is about and as you may have guessed I have recently been indoctrinated ir%it. I suppose we all try to teach somebody something at some time, even if only our grandmothers, and what the professors are saying now is that we are doing it all wrong and should intro- duce scientific methods as a means of developing a system- approach to training. In a nutshell, formulate the aim in terms of specific objectives, design the most effective method in terms of time, cost and learning to meet the objective and check, check, check by feedback from students and instructors and employing officers that the instruction has met its objectives. Even more succinct, it is an attempt to close the gap between theory and practice, and goodness knows that gap exists. It starts with the employing officer defining precisely the job to be done;—job analysis, and job specification are the techniques—and it ends with the employing officer saying whether the officer or soldier he is receiving matches specification. This is what is called a closed loop and here is a simplified picture of the Mellor loop: — TRAINING JOB JOB ANALYSIS ^ ^ OBJECTIVES > TRAINING CONTENT SELECT METHODS ^ TRAINING AND TEST- ING < > FEEDBACK -< >. MODIFY OR UP-DATE JOB. As will be seen, much of what goes on between the begin- ning and the end of the- ; ioop is, I suppose, the province of instructors and therefore not of general interest. However, here for fun, is a small exercise in verbal association. Read the following list three times: Black nothingness, One brown penny, Two red lips, Three coins in an orange fountain, A yellow dog has four legs. Five green fingers, A blue tailed fly has six legs, Seven purple seas, An eightiy) year old man has grey_ hair, A white cat has nine lives. You have now indelibly imprinted the colour code for the values of resistances in an electrical circuit. li But what about those pigeons and K O R ? " you are saying; "Are you sure it's not corn?". Ah! well, the pigeons belong to Dr. B. Skinner, the American pioneer of linear programme learning. He managed to teach pigeons to play tennis by sequencing the required actions in small steps and rewarding the correct response—yes, with corn. Currently, he is curing neurotic ladies by a similar reward and punishment technique. Thus if you are patient enough you can teach any- thing by leading in small careful steps from known to unknown. There is an ACE II map-reading programme which is a model of its kind. In theory, and particularly if you are a behavioural psychologist, you can teach people absolutely anything by this technique. Tliris is where KOR comes in—knowledge of result. In programmed learning this is immediate; in ordinary teaching it is received after the final exam, if then. Dr. Norman Crowder objected that people aren't really like pigeons—they jib at progressing in such minute steps—so he evolved the branching programme in which the bright student may short-circuit and the duller one team from mistakes and be ted off along remedial loops or branches. I have read such a programme on the appreciation of the English sonnet and found it very good. This is, of course, all frightfully old hat now. My view on educational techniques is that it ail depends on how they are used, the human factors of interest and motivation are all- important. Perhaps this is where Flanagan comes in—I remember on one St Barbara's Day, a visiting padre, a bit at sea, said "All I know about St Barbara is that she was burnt to death/' Similarly, when 1 bravely asked who Flanagan was, they said, " He asked questions of USAF air crews returning from missions." In fact Dr. J. C, Flanagan has evolved a critical incident technique for evaluating the effectiveness of training by studying ex-trainees in their final Job situation. This rightly puts the emphasis on the final product and is a way of deciding what elements in a job are the essential or the critical ones. This takes us to the beginning and end of the Mellor loop. The technique depends on getting an agreed statement of the aim or job from the supervisors, then questioning those performing the job with the object of getting from them an account of those incidents which have been successful or unsuccessful in carrying out the job. In a way it uses the exception principle as extremes of behaviour are more easily spotted than the general norm. It gets rid of the vague platitudes which one so often gets as an assessment of performance. From there, the chain leads back via analysis to determine problem areas, to improved methods of selection and training to eliminate the established areas of failure. But what of course commended the subject to me was the bizarre title and this I hope, dear reader, has also attracted you to this short dissertation on the desirability of analysing what you are supposed to be doing, using the best available techniques to do it, and checking that your methods are effective. Perhaps, by popular request, I might be permitted to expand some of these ideas at a later date, 183 flams and the choice of Hocks, Burgundies and other wines is almost as dazzling! Saccone and Speed make a point of offering you a truly magnificent variety of wines, spirits and cigars. The range and quantity may surprise you—the superb quality will not. That's something you can always expect from Saccone & Speed. May we send you our price list? SACCONE & SPEED LTD 325ackvilleSi, London Wl. Tel. REGent 2061 Wine Merchants to KM. Services since 1839 o-i |
| Book number | R0238 |