Ant Pugh made an interesting post on Linkedin that got me thinking about the role of theory. You can read it here. As someone who has read a lot of theory, I got to thinking about how theory is used. Most English departments these days have a lot of theory in their courses. If you do any advanced study in English, you will definitely run into it.
Like English, the field of learning and development has its fair share of theory. I did a post a while back on how to remember theory. You can find it here. Here’s how I’ve seen theory working:
To gatekeep: I don’t see this as much in learning and development, thank goodness. I definitely saw more of this in academia. Theory is knowledge that is generally only accessible to a few people. It can serve as the basis for forming a community of people who know that theory. You wanna be a part of that community? You gotta learn the theory.
To measure intelligence: This is definitely an academic thing. The people who know theory and can joke about it are “smart.” Theory gives you a vocabulary that others don’t have. It can make you sound smarter.
To guide learning design and deployment: This is perhaps the best use of theory. I use a few theories to guide how I design learning–Gagne’s nine events of instruction, Keller’s ARCS model, Merrill’s first principles of instruction, and Mayer's 12 principles of multimedia mostly. Once learning is developed and implemented, Kirkpatrick’s model is used frequently to evaluate it.
To establish best practices. This is a really nice application of theory. A regular review of theory is great to determine which ones are still useful. Those theories that are useful are what should be taught and what new people in learning and development should learn.
What about you? What are your go-to learning and development theories?
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