Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum The hard process of learning: (Un)awareness of (in)competence

In an other topic Mom3Gram wrote: Sometimes it seems that your mind takes a few days of leave. And indeed it really does! Especially when learning new skills most of us will experience it: clumsiness all over. We are sort of lost in the woods of possibilities . There are quite a few frustrated posts of beginning-beginners to show it.

However annoying, these irritating blank moments are also very good examples of how the progression of the learning process takes it course. And when we know how it works, maybe we can be better prepared to face the difficult moments.

Usually when trying to master a complex new skill we have to travel to 4 stages:

Unaware incompetent
The happy ignorant stage. In this stage we aren't able to perform a certain skill, but we can’t be bothered by it, because we don’t miss this particulary skill. F.i. I’m a late adult beginner without any musical background. I’ve never missed it and I never felt clumsy or anything because I could not play the piano. I was totally musignorant and very happy with it!

Aware incompetent
Then we start to learn something new, and almost immediately we feel stupid, clumsy and sometimes frustrated and demotivated. Because in this stage of the learning process we are constantly aware of our incompetence. It's affecting our self image and confidence. After a while we, when we continue practising, we shift from this stage to the next, being

Aware competent
In this stage we begin to master the first steps of a lengthy process. Sometimes we even think: I’m doing fine! But it’s not fully embedded, we have to focus constantly to perform and exersise the newly gained skills in a proper manner. And in this stage we jump back and forth to stage 2, shifting from a good feeling: “Nice, I’m doing well” to “Chips, I’ll never learn it, I'm a total disaster again”…… and finally, sometimes after years and years of practising we might reach the stage of

Unaware competent
The skills are fully confirmed, it’s become as natural as breathing.

Stage 2 and 3 (and the shifting between them) is usually the largest pitfall. We can easily become frustrated and demotivated. And that’s exactly what most of the real beginners have experienced/ wil experience, sometimes to an extend that quitting seems the only option.(Don't!!! )

Whilst writing this I’m painfully aware of my incompetence to explain something about a subject (which is for crying out loud my core business for at least the last two decades) in another language. Really difficult to express myself in a proper way.
So if it’s sounds like blabbering, then the real intention has got lost in the translation . If that's the case I’m sorry….

Greetings from

Chaplin

Interesting post, chaplin, and very consistent with the emerging literature on automatic behavior coming out of social psychology.

For me, the transition between Stage 1 and Stage 2 is the hardest... ignorance is bliss, after all, and in Stage 1 you're happily making flawed music. But once you become aware of the RIGHT way to do something, and you realize that you are doing it WRONG, it's hard to go on blissfully doing it the wrong way... but there's usually a frustratingly long interval involved in learning the right way.

I so agree with this breakdown. The first personal example of this that comes to mind for me (maybe because I've been playing piano since age 5) when I read this post was when I was learning to ski! I was 17 or 18. I had never even thought about skiing but all my friends there at college had been talking about it for a year and I wanted to be part of it. The first three lessons had me ready to quit in frustration, I couldn't even stop the skis from sliding me down the hill backwards. I had to keep reminding myself - even VERBALLY - "this is a SKILL you can't expect to do it great the first couple of tries (especially coming from a family of couch potatoes) BE PATIENT if it were that easy then everyone would be an Olympic skier...."

After about a month I started gaining some competence and along with it some confidence. Now (after doing it for about 30 years) it's almost instinctive, I don't even really pay attention to what I'm doing, I just .....point 'em down the hill and go.

But the experience and my abililty as an almost-adult to step back and look at the process while it was going on, was a real lesson for me about the learning process. Just maybe it helped me towards being a better teacher/mentor, too.

Thanks both for your reply.

@ Monica
Now that's an interesting experience. I've tried to form an image of the difficulties as you describe between 1 and 2, because most of the time the experienced burden is between 2-3. Hopefully I've understood it correctly. In stage 1 we're all happy ignorants, until the point an idea of learning a new skill has developped. Being unaware of the specific skills we usually tend to underestimate the specific skills required. Then we are going to execute our plan (which means shifting to 2.), and from that moment we can not be ignorant anymore. So shifting between 1 and 2. is most of the time a one time happening. (Once you've tried something, you mostly can't go back to ignorant bliss.) Of course the progression of learning is only a theoretical frame, with plenty space for interesting personal differences, and surely your experience of the 1-2 transition as the most difficult, makes me really curious....

@ SF
Nice experience, I can fully relate to it. You literally feel the clumsiness and demotivation/frustration is a serious pifall. I've had a similar one (years ago) with horseriding. It looked so easy from my point of view (safely behind the gate ), and I couldn't understand why there was so much pratice needed. Until I was on horseback myself...

Hi,

Intriguing post.

A couple of things occurred to me as I read. One was that people who write textbooks - and I'm thinking about music theory among other things - nearly always seem to belong to category 4. That's the stage when you feel confident enough in your knowledge and experience to do such a thing. However, it also means that you have forgotten what it was like 'not to know'. As you say, it's become as natural as breathing. So the explanations all too often are completely correct, and yet still utterly incomprehensible to a real beginner.

It's not so common to find an author with the gift of being able to give clear overviews, in advance, and then present the pieces of the puzzle in an order that makes clear sense if you have no prior knowledge at all. Or they give a huge chunk of information but forget to mention that, in the real world, you'll only use or encounter perhaps 10% of it commonly, and so on.

I now have quite a reasonable working knowledge of music so I enjoy reading theory books and filling in gaps and rounding out perspectives. But I can still remember struggling through books that were correct but still unenlightening. I'd then work out a missing piece (or find it somewhere else, maybe even later in the same book) and then think "Why the heck didn't they SAY THAT BEFORE!!!"


The other thing that occurred to me was just how much progress I've made with music away from an instrument, just by reading and thinking, and letting the brain sort it out. I read an article a while back about exercise which claimed that the researchers had discovered that they could get an improvement in muscle mass in their subjects just by getting them to visualise doing exercises! Exciting notion. I think I'll just go and have a good lie down and visualise being a better piano player....

Cheers,

Chris

Well said everyone,

Where would you think

"you don't know that you don't know" (maybe Monica's point)

fits best in the mix or does it fit nicely in all of the levels?

I so see (read: experience myself ) this process over and over again. I think it happens all along the way in learning any skill, or even information. When I first played dance music I could play the oom-pah in good tempo, follow the music and tune changes, and - if the melody instruments lost the place entirely I knew where we were and could fumble enough of the melody to let them find the place again. Pretty good, huh?

And then I started playing with a bigger band. My, the things I didn't know I didn't know. Learning to actually listen and hear the other instruments (and the piano is *much* louder than an octave mandolin), to try to play sometimes to not overwhelm them, and I haven't really even started to learn to play in such a way that I leave room for them - they are kind enough to try to get around me (not that they have a choice - I'm the 800-pound gorilla of the acoustical world). New things are *constantly* unfolding, and my skillfulness lags *way* behind my awareness

I'm not sure I'm even fully in to the unaware competent stage with the oom-pah, and I've been playing more than 10 years.

But I found the description of the process to be reflective of what I experience, anyway.

Cathy

Exactly! I try to overcome that as a teacher by constantly stretching myself to learn new things, which puts me at exactly the same Stages #1-3 as those whom I am privileged to teach.

Chaplin that is a really cool breakdown of the learning process:) thanks for posting this up:)

Would this work for aerobics too?

Good one.

I've found that (good) teachers who teach children a lot can also sometimes retain the ability to explain things in a clear and logical order, without skipping steps.

I had a couple of terms of guitar lessons from a guy who had taught kids at the local school for years, so he was totally used to blank looks and lack of understanding. He was patient, clear and always easy to follow. But it must still be very easy to lose track of which student now knows which facts, so he also kept a notebook in which he'd jot down a quick reference to the lesson that had just finished. Next week, before you went in, he'd take a quick look. When you sat down he'd say "And how did you go with those Am chords?" - or whatever. Marvellous - it always made you feel like he'd taken an interest in your journey, and knew where you were and what you needed to know next.

By contrast, I also had a few lessons from a young guy fresh out of the local Conservatorium. Lovely guy, great musician and composer, and I liked him a lot, but at the time I rarely had any idea what he was talking about.

Apparently we often learn best from what some researchers call "Coping Models" which meant people on the same track as us, but just slightly further ahead. In other words those who have recently solved the same problems we're facing and know what the physical and mental hurdles to overcome were, how long it might take, what else you need to know before it makes sense, etc. Works very well (on forums too) provided that the student 'mentor' has actually got it right, which you can't always guarantee.

Your way of tackling the problem sounds excellent.

Cheers,

Chris

Thank you all for your vividly described experiences, which pave the path of learning.

I must admit, that when I heard that it was a little hard to swallow. But read on...

I've now remembered where I came across it. It wasn't an article, it was in a medical talk on the radio. The resident doctor/scientist was talking to somebody whose team had been researching a disease which involves serious muscle wasting. Various traditional treatments involved steroids and so on in an attempt to delay or stop the wasting. They had taken a different tack and focused on taking a 'friendlier' supplement, without the side effects, and using a tailored exercise program. They reported good gains in muscle mass using this strategy. But one of the interesting aspects was that the test subjects could also get an improvement in muscle mass just by visualising the exercise.

At first, you think "Pull the other leg!" but actually it's perfectly logical. Exercise doesn't instantly build muscle. If I go out now and run five miles or work out for an hour in the gym, I'm unlikely to come home with big muscles (actually I'm likely to come home in an ambulance, but that's by the way... ). Instead, the exercise tells the brain that there's a clear need for bigger muscles and that the body needs to start diverting resources (proteins or whatever it is) towards building better muscles.

The building process is not instaneous. The more regularly and effectively you exercise, the clearer the message. So the theory is quite simple - you can send the message to the brain, and actually trigger the building, by visualising doing the exercise. Of course this does mean thinking your way through a sequence of routines - you can't just lie back and think "Geez, I'd like to look like Arnie the bodybuilder, and watch the muscles pop up. And some people might be more effective visualisers than others. So for many of us, we might as well drag on the joggers and get on with the exercise. But if you're already in a wheelchair, or bed-bound that might not be an option.

I play (or attempt to play) a number of instruments, and when I first started to mess around I assumed that I'd go rapidly backwards if I put one down for a while. This didn't happen.

Instead, the modest backslide in technical skill seemed to be offset by a general steady increase in overall 'musicality' - that subtle feeling for timing and touch that marks the better player from the beginner. And, provided that I know what notes I'm trying to hit - say C, G, G, E, E, C - I have no trouble, even as a beginner pianist, visualising my hand doing that sequence and then siting down and playing it immediately and expressively at full speed. And if I can do it for six notes, why not more...

There are lots of ways of using the brain's power in creative ways - from 'positive thinking' to visualisation, using various memory tricks, and so on. Interesting stuff, that borders on magic at times...

Cheers,

Chris

Chris, I think you're quite right. It was only an image of a sort of 'Popeye' figure that made me joking around a bit.

As it is possible to lower your heart rate or blood pressure by mind set exercises or to train your skills through visualisation, it can very well be that you can also enhance your muscle mass. Rather a comforting thought, isn't it?


Have a nice day!
from Chaplin

"Blank moments" - never better said. I thought I was doing fairly well until my last lesson. I had read about the difficulty that many adult beginners have retaining material. Well, I experienced just that this weekend during my last lesson and I can't even begin to tell you how frustrating this was. I just wanted the lesson to be over...... and yes, it was demotivating and demoralizing.