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This review has been accessed times since September 7, 2005

Schank, Roger. C. (2005). Lessons in learning, eLearning, and training: Perspectives and guidance for the enlightened trainer. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Pp. XVII + 292
$35.00   ISBN 0-7879-7666-0

Reviewed by Scott H. Switzer
University of Colorado at Denver

September 3, 2005

As an outspoken critic of the current state of education and training, Roger Schank has written a new book on learning targeted at the corporate trainer or training developer. Through the use of entertaining and engaging stories, Schank discusses a variety of issues ranging from knowing what can and can not be taught to learners in the context of training to how learners think and learn during their training experiences. Offering a number of insightful examples and valuable tips and tricks for trainers and developers alike, Schank offers a unique and fresh perspective on developing innovative, learning-by-doing strategies that he argues will improve performance in the workplace.

Many practitioners in the field of training development and instructional design are familiar with the name Roger Schank. Anyone who has been to one of the many professional training conferences or who is familiar with the growing body of literature in the field will likely recognize the name as both a controversial figure and a candid voice for transforming learning through learning-by-doing. In his new book, “Lessons in Learning, e-Learning, and Training,” Schank continues his campaign to achieve fundamental change in the creation of corporate learning products by encouraging trainers to get learners to do something, allow them to practice doing it, and to get them to reflect and start a dialogue that will ultimately result in a more skilled and competent workforce.

In order to understand the magnitude of this book, it helps to know who Schank is and where he is coming from. For years, he has been one of the most outspoken critics of public education and indeed, a strong proponent of educational reform. It is fair to say that, given the landscape of literature in the field of teaching, learning and instructional design, his perspective is somewhat unique. While many experts extol the virtues of learning-by-doing, Schank has, through countless professional presentations and through his numerous books and articles on the subject, provided a number of compelling examples of learning products that illustrate just how innovative and effective his strategies can be for his clients. For example, his book “Designing World Class E-Learning” provides a wealth of practical stories and detailed examples of how organizations like IBM, General Electric, and Columbia University transformed their own eLearning products into highly experiential learning environments to develop a more “highly skilled workforce” (Schank, 2001).

The primary message comes early in this book. “My simple message is: don’t tell anyone anything ever” (Schank, 2005). It is also in the first chapter where the conceptual framework for the book emerges. It is clear that Schank believes that learning-by-doing is always more effective than learning-by-telling and that learning-by-doing is best accomplished through complex, high-fidelity simulations that require learners to engage at the highest possible level. However, in an earlier book, Virtual Learning, he (1997) writes:

Learning by doing is easier said than done. John Dewey recognized this way back in 1916 when he noted that schools insist on telling students what they need to learn despite research clearly demonstrating that learning by telling doesn’t work and learning by doing does (p. 15).

Equally revealing is a quote from a recent “Educational Outrage” column, a regular contribution that deals with controversial issues in corporate training and higher education:

The question is why school teaches the subjects that it does and whether that should be allowed to continue. Most of what you learn in high school is irrelevant to anyone’s real life. Ask any high school student – they know this all too well. The truth is that unless you want to be a professor, most of what you learn in college or graduate school can be quite irrelevant as well. Even MBA programs, practical as they may be in principle, tend to forget that the students are just there to learn how to do well in business (Schank, May 29, 2005).

In the same column, he adds:

Professors, who are of course quite academic, might not be the best determiners of what students want to learn or need to learn. Typically they just teach what they want to teach, which is not the same thing. The high school curriculum, school incarnate, was designed by a bunch of professors in 1892. They were not thinking about what students might need to learn in order to succeed in today’s world (¶ 4).

And finally, in a statement directly from the book, Schank leaves little doubt to his perspective on the future of education. “To put this another way – a way that may be unpalatable for many of you – classrooms are, for the most part, a waste of time” (Schank, 2005).

To add a level of credibility to his perspective, Schank has amassed an impressive set of credentials in a variety of corporate and academic settings. Currently the Chief Learning Officer at the newly established Trump University, he has established himself as a reputable researcher in the field of computer science and has been a long time proponent of artificial intelligence. In addition to teaching at universities such as Stanford and Yale, Schank was the founder of the Institute of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University at the same time he held professorial appointments in three different disciplines. Most recently, he founded at least two companies focused on corporate training development, Cognitive Arts and Socratic Arts, and was later asked by Carnegie-Mellon University to serve as a Career Distinguished Professor in the School of Computer Science and their Chief Education Officer.

However, despite this impressive resume, Schank is not popular among many contemporaries in the field of education as a result of his increasingly vocal criticism about the state of teaching and learning. Again, from Virtual Learning:

School isn't really about learning; it's about short-term memorization of meaningless information that never comes up later in life. The school model was never intended to help people acquire practical skills. It is intended to satisfy observers that knowledge is being acquired (for short periods of time) (Schank, 1997).

In a recent discussion with a group of corporate trainers, Schank again takes aim at his colleagues in higher education. “Professors don't actually care about education. Students aren't really learning and professors aren't really teaching, but the job is so cushy, no professor is interested in changing it” (Slutsky, 2005).

Despite my background in both corporate training and higher education, I confess that I am a fan of Roger Schank. After reading his books and articles and seeing a number of examples of his eLearning efforts over the years, I am convinced that he has the background and credibility to fairly criticize the status quo in education. In addition, anyone who has attended a presentation by Schank at a professional conference, fan or not, can attest to the fact that the courseware he and his companies have developed are indeed unique and well designed learning experiences that have a distinctive impact on the target audience.

That said, I am not so biased as to be blind to a number of issues that color his perspective. For instance, in my years of working in the field of corporate training and on a number of high profile, large budget products, I have not had anywhere near the latitude with clients or the budget necessary to develop a product that resembles any of Schank’s work. Further, as a participant in both the corporate training environment and field of higher education that he sharply criticizes, I also see that there is more to educational reform than to assert that the current state is simply wrong. It is my belief that if Schank could provide meaningful examples of how he has successfully overcome the status quo in his many and varied experiences, this book might be an even more valuable addition to the literature base that exists in the field.

Situated directly in the world of a corporate trainer or training developer, the book addresses a number of key issues that are relevant to a variety of educators. The main premise of the book is based largely on Schank’s overall conceptual framework described above, as well as a strong advocacy of the use of stories in learning. Schank models the use of storytelling in nearly every chapter by offering an interesting array of stories to make each of the chapters more memorable for the reader. At the highest level, the book focuses primarily on three broad, overarching issues: (a) what learning content can and can not be taught, (b) how learners typically think and learn, and (c) how technology can play a role in facilitating learning. Schank provides the reader with his simple hope for the book, stating “…that by reading these essays you are starting to reflect on what you are doing in training or might plan to do in training” (Schank, 2005).

To help provide a framework for his own theories of teaching and learning, Schank offers his “Principles of Learning” (Schank, 2005), a somewhat tongue-in-cheek effort to provide a foundation for what the reader will experience in the book.

• Just-in-time information delivery makes information useful…OR, don’t tell people things they cannot immediately make use of.
• Authentic activities motivate learners…OR, don’t tell people how to do something they will never have to do in real life.
• Guessing is not doing…OR, don’t make me guess the right answer you were dying to tell me.
• Identification is not recall…OR, it doesn’t really matter what you can show that you know.
• Playing a role has nothing to do with watching…OR, have somebody do something.
• Practice makes perfect…OR, if you teach it, have them do it one more time.
• Make people reflect…AND, get a dialogue started.

In the process of promoting a learning-by-doing approach, Schank strongly advocates the use of goal-based scenarios to develop realistic learning environments. His description of this strategy is as follows:

In each scenario, the user is presented with an overview of the situation and then has the opportunity to do some background research by poring over scenario-specific resources. These resources include things like an employee’s last performance review or notes about an idea an employee has come up with. The scenarios are much harder for people who haven’t prepared themselves properly (p. 63).

One of the main benefits to goal-based scenarios is that these “scenarios help people practice skills that are difficult to practice in real life without causing them (and their organization) great difficulties” (p. 66).

As an example of storytelling to make his point, Schank uses a story about a dinner party to illustrate his perspective on human memory. In a detailed story, he states that people remember (a) their feelings at the time, (b) having fun, (c) the behavior of others, (d) things that they found personally exciting or disgusting, and (e) who annoyed them, who interested them, and they remembered being embarrassed (p. 103). As a result, people do not remember the details of most situations because “they are not the important stuff of human memory” (p. 104). Because people tend to remember feelings, visual images, people, and unexpected situations and their resolution, Schank provides some practical recommendations for trainers:

• Make trainees feel something – fear; exhilaration; surprise, happiness, any feeling will do (except boredom).
• Make sure trainees see things (other than PowerPoint slides); these should be unusual things that cause them to wonder about them; smells work here as well.
• Insist on many varied interactions between people; these are best if they are one-on-one interactions that involve dealing with some real issue.
• Make sure that something that’s truly unexpected happens and the point you want to drive home in training is illuminated by that unusual event (p. 109).

Acknowledging that many educators and trainers will find learning-by-doing difficult to implement, Schank advances a step-by-step outline for making it work effectively:

• Set up teams to work together.
• Set up mentors to help the teams when they have questions.
• Set up simpler projects and deliverables or break up the main deliverable into smaller chunks as a way to make a complex project tractable.
• Create information online that will help them get started, offering hints and texts that will help.
• Point to textual materials that will guide them (a book on how to do it, company mentors, and such).
• Teach mentors how to teach using a Socratic method. They should not provide answers – only suggestions.
• Make sure the deliverables are evaluated by experts and that they give good feedback (p. 153-4).

In alignment with his practical emphasis in developing learning products, Schank also provides useful lists of tips and tricks for practitioners to improve their training products immediately. Through the use of detailed stories and by asking thought-provoking questions directed at readers, Schank practices what he preaches, encouraging readers to reflect on their own training efforts and use some of the recommended strategies as a way to think differently about their own products and teaching and learning in general.

To his credit, Schank is quick to point out one of the key concerns in implementing his ideas. “Time is the enemy of education…Time constraints are the enemy of learning by doing. It takes time to practice – and without practice there is no real learning” (p. 149). In addition to addressing the impact of time on learning, he also acknowledges how time-consuming and expensive it can be to implement these ideas. Despite the numerous detailed examples and the strong promotion of his strategies, Schank allows that high-fidelity simulations can be extremely costly to implement and execute and are not appropriate for every learning situation. Despite these concerns, the ideas contained in this book can still be very valuable for most readers who want to “jump start” their training development strategies.

As stated earlier, one significant oversight is a lack of attention to the nuances of organizational change and the subtleties associated with addressing educational reform. As anyone who has seen Schank in person knows, he has a strong physical presence and given his passion for the subject matter, he can be quite intimidating. It is unlikely that most of the readers of this book would command the same level of attention and, as a result, many may find the process of transforming their training to be considerably more difficult than Schank and his organization would in a similar situation. In most of his stories, Schank uses his strong personality, an established reputation, a deep experience base, and typically abundant resources to completely revolutionize their client’s training effort, but it is highly unlikely that anyone who reads the book can closely identify with the situations. Perhaps in his next book, he will shed some light on ways for trainers to get the most out of their limited resources and offer a perspective on achieving sweeping educational reform “on a budget.”

In summary, this book is an enjoyable read and can be a valuable resource for trainers who feel stuck, are not getting the results they desire, or are experiencing difficulty developing engaging training products. As previously stated, the book provides a number of thoughtful and practical examples that can get trainers, instructional designers, and educators thinking differently about the challenges they face. Also, this book makes an important contribution to the body of literature for training and instructional design by providing a compelling voice and strong advocacy of learning-by-doing. It is not likely that everyone will like or agree with Schank, but it is equally unlikely that anyone in the field of education would not see the book as an important resource for improving learning products of all types.

References

Schank, R. C. (1997). Virtual learning: A revolutionary approach to building a highly skilled workforce. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schank, R. C. (2001). Designing world class eLearning: How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, and Columbia University are succeeding at e-Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schank, R. C. (2005, May 29). Is Trump Academic? Educational Outrage, Column #20. Retrieved July 8, 2005 from http://www.socraticarts.com/educational%20outrage/edoutrage20.html.

Slutsky, I. (2005, June 23) Education gets the Schank. Retrieved July 11, 2005 from http://heresmybyline.typepad.com/irina/2005/06/education_got_t.html.

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