Ray Hoskins Blog

Personal Life Coaching, Youth Development, General Youth Advocacy

Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Filed under: Developing Capable People

Facilitating Learning: Experience, Identify, Analyze, Generalize

I was very blessed early in my career to work with H. Stephen Glenn, and one of the most important things he taught me was the "EIAG Process".  He pointed out that an individual's perception is the key to their attitudes, motivation, and behavior.  Therefore, in order to deal with any behavior, it was important to understand the belief behind any behavior.  Also, if you wanted people to learn and apply, the teaching and learning process needed to tie content to someone's existing perceptions.  To do that, he taught the EIAG Process.

The process works fairly simply.  The first thing that occurs is any experience that has potential for learning.  It can be a lesson in a classroom, or it can be any situation that occurs and is followed by a conversation.  So the E in the EIAG process is Experience.

Once the experience is occurring and/or has occurred, you tie the experience to perception by first asking questions that challenge a listener to "Identify" those aspects of the experience which are important to him or her.  These are "What questions" like:

  • What happened?
  • What are you feeling?
  • What did you see?
  • What was important?

These questions help connect with the experience and identify the impact.

After this, the next goal is to help the person "Analyze" the significance of the experiences he or she has just identified.   To to this, you would ask "What" and "Why" questions like:

  • Why was that significant?
  • What caused that to happen?
  • What is meaningful about it?
  • What made that important?

These questions further build a perception of meaning in the moment about the experience.  However, people, especially young people often have trouble generalizing and applying learning across contexts.  In order to help with that, we ask "Generalizing questions" like:

  • How can you use this?
  • How is this valuable to you?
  • In what way will this affect what you do in the future?
  • What wisdom did you gain from this?
  • What did you learn from this whole thing?

So, at the end of the process, we have helped someone identify what happened that might be useful or significant for them, helped them analyze the specific usefulness or significance, and invited them to think about how this learning would be usefule on a more global scale.  I invite you to try this with any of your students, children, or anyone else in your environment.  It does work. 

Question of the Day: "What is important about asking the questions of the day?"

The last few posts have offered a number  of suggested questions to ask young people in your life.  The last questions were "What is important about ______?" and "What will that do for you?".  In an attempt to stay consistent with my suggestions and avoid why, I am asking what is important about these questions.  What will it do for young people and yourself if you use them?

There are many benefits to asking these questions.  The simple answer is they guide young people to think in new ways, and that is true.  There is much more to it.  Referring back to previous blogs on H. Stephen Glenn's developing capable people model, we have a need to help young people develop the perceptions that they are Capable, Significant, and Influential.  Steven realized, as do many youth development theorist, that the most important of these perceptions is that of significance.  Young people need to know that they matter, that their opinions matter, and that someone cares about them.  This is the basis of bonding, which with many young people is the greatest challenge also.  Asking the questions in a respectful manner communicates that you believe a young person is significant.  Listening to an honoring their responses further cements that perception.  

Through asking these types of questions you also communicate that the young person is Influential.  The questions are framed to acknowledge there ownership of their own lives in the long run.  "What kind of _____________ do you want to be" language implies that the person asking the question accepts the fact that you are in the drivers seat in your life.  In my work with Casey Family Programs, one of the most impressive things to me was the title of their youth development framework for youth in foster care. They titled it "It's My Life".  The title itself declared that young people were the ones who would drive the bus.

There is also an implicit message that the person being asked the questions is Capable of answers which will contribute to his or her own success.  By asking about someone's intentions about their character as an adult, you communicate a belief that they are capable of creating positive characteristics.  

A larger message to you here is that you are the message.  If you use methods like the ones I describe in my articles, you will be communicating meta messages that young people are Capable, Significant, and Influential.  If you fail to engage them in these processes, you will communicate their insignificance.  If you challenge them without asking appropriate questions, you will communicate their incompetence and helplessness.  It is the competence of the adults interacting with young people that makes the most significance difference in their lives.