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Two Dimensions
of Practice
James Atherton
Based
on a paper given at the University of Humberside
(now University
of Lincoln) in 1992
People from politicians to managers seem to have great faith
in training, and even sometimes in education. We are told that it
is a panacea: it will improve competitiveness, it will go a long
way to reducing unemployment, it will improve health and safety,
and it will even stop child abuse. It has become very big business,
but despite the investment of time and money, it seems sometimes
to yield rather poor dividends.
Possible reasons for that will be found throughout this site,
but I want to start with a model of working practice, rather than
of training as such. The argument is simple: there are some aspects
of practice which can readily be improved by training, and there
are some which can not: those need different kinds of intervention,
and although you could perhaps dilute the notion of “training” until
it covers all of them, that would be a semantic trick, not a reflection
of the real world. Moreover, working with these different forms
of practice places different demands on the teacher.
This model of practice suggests that it can be rated on two dimensions,
which are independent of each other, yielding four categories. The
first dimension assesses the extent to which practice accords with
the values or perhaps the preferences of the practitioner: the second
is about understanding the rationale of practice and its effects.
Most practice in most occupations is undertaken fairly willingly.
That is not to assert that most of us enjoy what we do, but that
we have a fairly clear idea of what we ought to be doing, and we
act in accordance with that idea. In contrast, there are occasions
on which we are forced to act in ways at variance with what we have
learned is best practice, which we shall refer to here as practising
“unwillingly”.
The reasons for unwilling practice are many, and for present
purposes it makes little difference what they are. Lack of resources
and unreasonable demands are probably two of the most common. As
a teacher, I may want to spend time getting to know the individual
needs of every person in my class, but the number of students and
the constraints of time may well mean that I have to treat them
as if they were all the same. As a doctor, I may want to talk to
my patients and find out what is behind the complaints which keep
them coming back for more sleeping tablets, tranquillisers or anti-depressants,
but the waiting-room is full again, and so I just write a repeat
prescription. As a manager, I may believe it important to consult
with my staff about impending changes, and involve them in decision-making,
but I am under pressure to get things done and so I just issue directives.
All of us are familiar with these everyday compromises.
A variant of unwilling practice may also stem from lack of time
to think, where the practitioner “knows better”, but regresses to
survival-oriented practice by “reflex”: the earlier learning is
so firmly established that when there is no time to reflect, it
surfaces although it may be instantly regretted. At a trivial level,
I have tried to train myself not to cross my hands on the steering
wheel while driving. I am fully persuaded that this is desirable
for better control. I remember to do it when I am concentrating
and approaching a corner in a planned fashion, but the moment I
am distracted or have to swerve in an emergency I cross my hands
again.
“Witting” is not a word we use very often, although “unwitting”
is fairly common. Just like other words which we only encounter
in the negative — such as "kempt", "couth" "ept"
and "ert" — it is easy to deduce its meaning [Digression]. Witting practice is knowing practice, when you understand
why you are doing something and what its likely consequences will
be. Unwitting practice is when you simply go through the motions
or obey orders without full understanding of the whys and wherefores.
Put these two dimensions together, and we have four kinds of
practice:
- Witting and Willing
- Witting and Unwilling
- Unwitting and Willing
- Unwitting and Unwilling
It should be pointed out that these are kinds of practice rather than kinds of work; that is, they relate to the ways in which
particular individuals do parts of their jobs at different times.
Any given task or procedure might be carried out in any of the four
forms, so it does not make sense to attempt to use these categories
for the purpose of job analysis, although it may make sense to use
them for appraisal.
Intentional (Witting and Willing) Practice
Most training programmes operate on the assumption that this
is the only kind of practice there is. The practitioner is doing
what she set out to do (willing), and in full knowledge both of
the reasons for doing so, and what is likely to follow from the
action. She can therefore be held fully accountable for that practice.
If management wishes to modify it, all they have to do is to issue
a new set of regulations, brief or train her to use them, and other
things being equal, practice will change. All this is patently obvious,
but it needs to be spelt out a little to provide the background
for the other categories.
Survival (Witting and Unwilling) Practice
As in the examples quoted above, here we have a practitioner
who knows what he ought to be doing, but finds that he can’t do
it. In all the examples cited, the problem is basically lack of
time, but it might equally be not having the right equipment. Try
to change the situation with regulations or even by offering further
training, and you will get protests: “It’s all very well telling
us to spend more time with our students/ patients/ clients/ staff,
but if I do, who’s going to...?”
Very often witting and unwilling practice is the product of rough
and ready prioritisation which necessitates taking short-cuts. There
is a rush order in the machine-shop, so a tool is set up without
using the full safety procedure, for example. It can easily become
institutionalised: there is a common form of industrial protest
known as “working to rule”, in which work is slowed almost to a
standstill by an insistence on following all procedures to the letter.
The very fact that this slows things down is testimony to required
standards being routinely ignored. This raises serious questions
about a culture of management accountability which trades on issuing
regulations which cannot practicably be applied; but for present
purposes the important consideration is that witting and unwilling
practice cannot be rectified by issuing more such instructions,
or simply by training in isolation.
Instead, there is a prior need to examine the circumstances under
which witting and unwilling practice occurs, and to ensure that
the opportunities are available for working without short-cuts.
Staff need to be convinced that there is a realistic assessment
of the situation before training itself is any use at all.
The consequences of such an analysis may be profound for management.
They may require a review of staffing levels and pay policy, for
example. But there is also an issue for trainers asked to participate
in a training effort to rectify such practice. Their efforts may
be in vain — which does not augur well for the re-employment of
a consultant trainer — but their credibility in the eyes of the
recipients of training may also be compromised. It is important
to most practitioners that those training them represent both high
standards of practice and also close acquaintance with real-world
problems. Failure to convince course members of this severely undermines
the effectiveness of training practice.
Not all survival practice is related to external pressures, however.
Staff in stressful occupations develop defences to enable them to
cope with the pressures. The most explicit study of this is Menzies’
classic “Case-study in the Functioning of Social Systems as a Defence
against Anxiety” (1967, in Menzies-Lyth,
1988), in which she examined how the structure of nurse training
had evolved (up to the time of her study) in order to inculcate
values and practices which preserved young and relatively immature
entrants from the emotional onslaught of dealing with seriously
ill patients. Here, the survival practice had become institutionalised.
Practical experience on wards was based on a rapid rotation, for
example, so that student nurses would not get to know the patients
too well or feel involved with them. Work was organised on the basis
of “task-lists”: a nurse would be assigned to do all the bed-pans
on the ward, and then perhaps to take round all the mid-morning
drinks, ensuring that the contact with any given patient was brief
and business-like. The level of dissatisfaction was high, but it
was implicitly accepted as being preferable to nurses getting “over-involved”,
and potentially burning out. The pattern of nurse training in the
UK has changed considerably since the study, but a number of nurse
trainers have commented that while one set of defences has been
stripped away, insufficient attention may be given to how to cope
with the pressures, which do not go away.
Such survival sub-cultures are not confined to nursing: studies
by a school of sociologists known as ethnomethodologists — generally
renowned for the obscurity of their writings — have shown similar
systems of “typifications” or stereotyping of clients, in a variety
of service agencies. They have been studied in the juvenile justice
system by Cicourel (1968),
in coroner’s services by Garfinkel
(1967), in nursing and the police by Sudnow (1965, 1967), in hospital
records by Garfinkel (1967), and in social work by Zimmerman
(1969). In each case — when you get behind their own pretentious
and obfuscatory jargon — they examine how an informal system of
categorisation of cases “for all practical purposes” grows out of
the practical pressures of doing the job. One effect is to dehumanise
the client, but they persist because they help the practitioner.
There may also be more personal factors which lead to the development
of survival practice. Transmitting bad news is an aspect of several
jobs which is notoriously done badly: but then given the tendency
of members of the public to blame the messenger, this is perhaps
not surprising. Either fear or a genuine desire not to hurt someone’s
feelings can lead to the information being fudged, or to a brusque
“hit and run” approach in which the news is blurted out, and then
the messenger escapes. Although there used to be a medical tradition
of not telling someone that he had cancer, for example, that is
fairly long gone, and practitioners talking about how they ought
to act are usually fairly clear about it. Nevertheless, in the heat
of the moment they may regress and act on the basis of survival
rather than good practice. Argyris
and Schön (1974) developed the useful distinction between
“theories-in-use”, rather than “espoused theories” to discuss this
discrepancy, in the context of negotiating skills. More moralistically,
and less helpfully, it may be referred to as “hypocrisy”.
This discussion suggests that tutors have an uphill struggle
in trying to work with survival practice. Unless they (and the learners’
group) can create an accepting and trustworthy environment, such
practice rarely emerges for discussion. Everyone knows what they
ought to be saying and doing, but may be very shame-faced about
what they actually do say and do. Given that such survival practice
is often only a small part of their overall pattern of work, however,
it is possible to get through to it with care (and time).
- The more the members of a course own the training, the more
effective it is likely to be. They need to be consulted at each
stage of its commissioning and design, and their agenda needs
to be acknowledged in the construction of the sessions. Tutors
and managers may feel that the members have got it all wrong,
but nothing useful at all will be achieved if they cannot identify
with the task of the training.
- A contract with the course members does not of itself create
the appropriate culture, but it can help. If the tutor can give
an undertaking of confidentiality (usually with specific exceptions
— they are not only realistic, but indicate that it is taken
seriously), learners may be more prepared to “open up”. Be aware,
however, that contracts themselves can be experienced as oppressive,
especially if formulated too piously, or their construction
is dominated by the politically correct members of the group.
Further, a contract will be tested, and if it fails you will
end up further back than when you started.
- On the one hand, role-play is often a good method of exposing
such survival practice: on the other, that is precisely why
some people find the technique very threatening. It needs to
be conducted in a constructive environment, and often simple
techniques like suggesting that first of all, people demonstrate
how to do something “as badly as possible”, facilitate the creation
of such an atmosphere. Work up to state-of-the-art good practice
slowly, giving critical feedback if necessary on just one aspect
of performance at a time.
- Make use of evidence and anecdotes from other settings with
which course members might identify.
- It sometimes helps to use a “package”, by which I mean an
established theoretical framework which provides a “container”
within which survival practice can be discussed. One of the
most popular packages for such purposes is Transactional Analysis
(see Stewart and Joines 1987,
inter al.). Overall, I have my doubts about some of the claims
made for TA, but it is eminently teachable and usually greatly
enjoyed, and the framework of “games” encourages group members
to talk about their own experiences — often of survival practice
— and to ask “What game is that?”
- But most important of all is to take seriously the reluctant
but powerful emotional investment people have in their survival
practice. After all, it helps them to keep on doing a difficult
job day in day out for years. No-one can just take it away
without showing that the alternative is better.
Shallow (Willing and Unwitting) Practice
Shallow practice is not be confused with surface learning (Marton,
Hounsell and Entwistle, 1997): it is more analogous to the seed
sown on rocky ground in the parable of the Sower (St. Mark
4:16-17). Another term might be "ignorant" practice.
There are basically two forms of such practice; where staff are
simply unaware of its potentially deleterious (or even beneficial)
effects, and where they have just been trained to operate a set
of procedures without knowing the reasons, and are thus unequipped
to deal with any variations from the norm. Naturally, these forms
overlap.
One of the clearest areas in which it is found is that of equal
opportunities. As I write this, I am preparing to teach part of
a course on post-compulsory education, one of the objectives of
which specifies an understanding of equal opportunities in adult
education. As part of the initial learning contract, students have
been asked to rate themselves on their pre-course understanding
or competence in relation to these objectives. I have just had tutorials
with a series of students who have asked, in one form or another,
“what is there to know about equal opportunities?” They protest
that they are not prejudiced against anyone and they treat all their
students the same, so that must be all there is to it. As they go
through the module, they will (or at least should) discover that
many of their well-intentioned practices are discriminatory, simply
because they are unwitting about their impact on members of minority
groups. I recollect the catering lecturer who was nonplussed by
the reaction of a Jewish student who objected to preparing chicken
Kiev, the IT teacher who could not understand why a visually-impaired
student wanted to learn DOS-based rather than Windows packages,
the tutor who took it as evidence of lack of motivation that women
adult returners to learning were regularly late for his 9.00 am
class, as well as the numerous teachers who have identified dyslexia
with lack of ability.
Equal opportunities is not the only area of shallow practice,
of course. The trainers engaged in the fruitless task of working
with the survival-oriented practitioners discussed in the previous
section might also be in the same position of ignorance about the
consequences of their work. But so, in a much more positive sense,
are some of the naive teachers who wonder why their students like
them so much, when they are prepared to look over a draft of an
assignment: they are surprised to learn that not everyone would
be prepared (or have time) to do it. But they are not merely ignorant
of common practice, they are blissfully unaware of how much it means
to some students that they are prepared to take such an interest.
The other form of practice is exemplified by the shop assistant
who asked me for my address when I was making a cash purchase, and
then could not explain to me why he needed the information: he protested
that no-one had ever asked before, but he would get into trouble
if he did not get it. I find myself in the same position in relation
to some of the questions on our standard university enrolment form:
the name of the school someone attended 20 years ago might be quite
irrelevant, but I know that if the box is left blank, a bureaucrat
will reject it. But I can’t really be bothered to make a fuss about
it or even find out why someone wants to know. These examples overlap
with the first category in that they are about seeking irrelevant
information and thus constitute an unwitting invasion of privacy,
but they are also in the second category because of their "Their’s
[sic] not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die" philosophy.
The implications for training are considerable. There is a danger
for example that competence-based training programmes can, themselves
unwittingly, promote shallow practice. If each component of the
job is divided into competences, and elements, and performance criteria,
there is a danger that the sum of the parts will be less than the
whole. Each component of the programme needs to be contextualised,
so that its relationship to the whole can be seen, and informed
decisions can be made about when to apply a particular approach.
A number of National Vocational Qualifications (such as those in
health and social care) have taken this to heart, with the introduction
of core competences which are primarily about the application of
appropriate values to the task; but the model does not lend itself
readily to such an approach. Similar concerns have been expressed
about the ability of a competence-based model to equip practitioners
(in all fields) to deal with situations of uncertainty, and hence
to provide an adequate basis for training at NVQ Levels 4 and 5.
In practice, of course, almost any kind of curriculum can suffer
from the same problems, partly because the assessment of practice
has to focus on simplified models of the real world. Even case-studies,
valuable though they are, have limitations. Even more intractably,
the knowledge base of the subject may be unwitting about some of
its consequences. The medical curriculum, for example, has changed
in quite important respects in recent years, not only because of
the discovery and development of new methods, but because of a recognition
that tried and trusted approaches to the treatment of routine conditions
either do not work or have side-effects which are worse than the
illness. Only recently have environmental concerns been taken on
board in the modelling of industrial processes. Here the issues
border on the political.
How far does one go in contextualising the curriculum? There
is a point at which one goes so far that it is no longer possible
to devote sufficient attention to the particular skills or knowledge
learners are supposed to be acquiring. (A colleague in Further Education,
currently devising a course in servicing electronic goods, complains
that so much emphasis is being put on the “customer care” requirements
of the course that the technical parts are being squeezed out.)
It is also possible to render learners impotent, by engaging with
issues over which they have no control. A few teachers would maintain
that engineering staff working on a product with military applications
need to be aware of who is buying it, but most draw the boundaries
much more narrowly, pointing out simply how important engineering
tolerances are for the “safe” operation of the product. Despite
the ethical and political problems, however, it is reasonable to
trace the potential effects of specific bits of practice within
the defined boundaries of a system — the political question is about
the drawing of those boundaries.
Driven (Unwilling
and Unwitting) Practice
This fourth category is the most difficult to describe, although
you may recognise it when you see it. It is also the most difficult
to address. I call it “driven” because there is a sense of compulsion
about it, or at least of not being aware of any alternative. It
may well be an expression of a personality trait with which someone
is not comfortable, but says, “It’s just me, I’m afraid ...” It
may be compulsive talking, it may be impatience, it may be shyness.
Try to make the person aware of it, and they may try to change,
but fail because it is so much a part of themselves. Very often
they have some slight idea of its impact, so it is not totally unwitting,
and they may well admit that they “wish I could listen/be so tolerant/let
go/be as organised as you,” but never really having had the experience
of being other than they are, they remain substantially unaware
of what their practice would be like if they were different.
If you are familiar with the personal development literature
of the 1960s and 70s, you may have come across the “Johari
window”, which like the present model, uses two dimension (in
this case “known/unknown to others” and “known/unknown to self”)
to yield four quadrants. This Driven practice may well correspond
with the “Blind self” (known to others but unknown to self), or
the “Unknown self”.
As the “Blind self” notion suggests, it is much easier to see
this form of practice in other people than it is in ourselves, but
everyone has their areas of it. For myself, I know that one area
is a failure to say exactly what I mean (I’m better at writing what
I mean than I am at saying it, although you may not believe that!):
I set out to say one thing and somehow by the time I have finished
I have said something different. I also come across to others as
a bit of a “cold fish”. It has taken quite a lot of reflection and
feedback to realise these quirks, and I am not comfortable with
them, but my insight is impotent. I also know that one of my defence
mechanisms when anxious about my teaching is to retreat into the
role of academic show-off, and pontificate about a subject at great
length. And if I use the word “actually” too much, I do not know
what I am talking about ... Ask my colleagues and they will no doubt
be able to list other features of which I am as yet unaware.
More than that, I have only the vaguest idea of how my practice
would be different if I did not have these failings _ or even if
they really are failings. How would my students react if I were
more approachable? Would my tutorials be different? Would my former
counselling practice have been different? I think I was quite effective
as a counsellor at an intellectual and decision-making level, but
would I have got more emotional responses if my body language had
been more relaxed? Would that have been a good thing? Would I have
helped some people less than in fact I did? A colleague tells me
that I produce polarised reactions in students — some think I am
a brilliant teacher (well, he did not actually say “brilliant”),
whereas some find me profoundly irritating or downright incomprehensible
(including my partner, who was once a student of mine). Few are
neutral.
Apart from the understandable reaction of asking who this guy
is who has the cheek to pronounce on teaching and learning issues
when he is so self-evidently incompetent himself, there is a serious
point to all this confession. Training as such is not going to address
this kind of practice. The restrictive solution is to say that anyone
so flawed should not be in a particular job _ they are quite unsuited.
Occasionally that may be true, but it applies to all of us. The
perfect practitioner, in whatever discipline, has not yet been invented.
The enabling solution is the aforementioned process of feedback
from others and reflection by yourself, perhaps abetted by such
devices as video recordings of yourself in action, and a commitment
to work through your limitations (and to capitalise on your strengths,
because some of this driven practice may just include your greatest
talents).
Training may be ineffective but more important, it may be intrusive
and exceed its authority. There is a well-known side-effect of adult
education, which has been termed “perspective transformation” (Mezirow,
1978).This occurs when the experience of learning goes beyond
an incremental change in a person’s knowledge, skill or understanding,
to a wholesale re-ordering of the way they think about themselves
and their position in the world. Willy Russell’s play and subsequent
film, “Educating Rita”, dramatises this awakening; and Paolo Freire’s
objective of “conscientisation” as a product of literacy education
is an explicit embrace of it as a desired outcome (Freire,
1972). It is not dependent on success in learning what the teacher
set out to teach. I have been confronted on several occasions by
students who have claimed that even a vocational day-release programme
has, for example, given them the courage to leave their partners.
This is embarrassing and even rather frightening for the teacher
who is credited with the transformation: but at least it was accidental.
It was a side-effect of showing people they could do more than they
thought they could, of raising their self-esteem and (waffly jargon)
“empowering” them. There is no way in which (at least now), I would
presume to set out to interfere to that extent in their private
lives. (I say “at least now”, because many years ago I worked on
a rather psychodynamically -oriented social work course about which
we used to joke that we took the students to pieces and then put
them back together again — and last year we had enough parts left
over to make two more students!)
The problem is that to address driven practice is to venture
into this therapeutic area, and it is difficult to know when one
is crossing a very indistinct line. Yes, I want to support a student
who is upset by some aspect of the learning. Yes, I want to give
feedback on performance so that he can reflect on it and change
if he wishes and is able to. Yes, I will try to help someone whose
learning is adversely affected by external pressures. But students
(and trainees in an occupational context) do not contract for a
psychological makeover when they join a course.
When I taught on another social work course a few years ago,
the external examiner commented at one point that he was concerned
that despite the extent and intensity of emphasis on anti-racist
and anti-discriminatory practice on the programme, the work he had
read indicated that the students were not actually using it in their
assignments. I found this disturbing, and tried to think through
what was going on, including asking some of the students who had
completed the programme (including some of the black students).
Their comments indicated that they experienced the teaching as a
sort of ritual obeisance to political correctness on the part of
the staff. They did not doubt staff sincerity, they just thought
it was not much practical use: so they made similarly token references
in their assignments, just enough to meet the explicit marking criteria
related to anti-discriminatory practice. I was not sure what to
make of this. We could reasonably expect that they should combat
race, gender and disability discrimination in their practice, and
this was explicitly assessed on their practical placements: but
could we — should we — legislate for what they should believe? Overall,
I think not. I think they had got it right and we had got it wrong.
References
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Willing
and Unwilling Practice
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