Leading Views: Pervasive Learning

Dan Pontefract makes a point in his book, Flat Army, about learning at the speed of need. He quotes Samuel Johnson, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.” We can’t know everything but we as a connected leader, we do well if we know where we can find it.

Success in leadership is not about what you know but the knowledge you can access. We need to focus on continuous learning or what Pontefract calls Pervasive Learning: The switch from a “training is an event” fixed mindset to “learning is a collaborative, continuous, connected and community-based” growth mindset.

The skills we need now are reflected in this statement from British Columbia’s Ministry of Education:

[The current curriculum] tends to focus on teaching children factual content rather than concepts and processes – emphasizing what they learn over how they learn, which is exactly the opposite of what modern education should strive to do. In today’s technology-enabled world, students have virtually instant access to a limitless amount of information. The greater value of education for every student is not in learning the information but in learning the skills they need to successfully find, consume, think about and apply it in their lives.

Students will focus on acquiring skills to help them use knowledge critically and creatively, to solve problems ethically and collaboratively, and to make the decisions necessary to succeed in our increasingly globalized world.