Currently, learning to drive, juggle new patterns, playing chess, programming, learning math and learn new things in general has made me revisit and question which learning stage I am. The 4 stages are:
Stage 1. unconcious incompetance – when you don;’t know how badly you are not doing it. this is when you don’t even know what it is you should be doing, and hence not doing it at all.
Stage 2. concious incompetance – when you know what you supposed to be doing, but doing it badly. when you are conciously aware of being unskilled or not able to do something which you are consciously trying to do.
Stage 3. concious competance – when you are doing something, and you are aware that you made a conscious attempt of doing something, and require a conscious attempt to be competant at something.
Stage 4. unconcious competance – when you repeatedly do something so well that it becomes natural and doesn’t require much or any conscious effort.
Stage 5. mastery is the fifth stage – you do something so well, it becomes second nature and are better than most people, and people would come to you for advice and recognise one as a master in that field. for example, my masters mathematics degree, people could come to me for advice about the very particular branch of math which I have expertise in.
reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
In the wiki link I found:
“As a fifth level, I like what I call ‘reflective competence’. As a teacher, I thought “If unconscious competence is the top level, then how on earth can I teach things I’m unconsciously competent at?” I didn’t want to regress to conscious competence – and I’m not sure if I could even I wanted to! So, reflective competence – a step beyond unconscious competence. Conscious of my own unconscious competence, yes, as you suggest. But additionally looking at my unconscious competence from the outside, digging to find and understand the theories and models and beliefs that clearly, based on looking at what I do, now inform what I do and how I do it. These won’t be the exact same theories and models and beliefs that I learned consciously and then became unconscious of. They’ll include new ones, the ones that comprise my particular expertise. And when I’ve surfaced them, I can talk about them and test them. Nonaka is good on this”
I have an example of my own, during juggling club a while ago, I was trying to teach somebody kickups using clubs, and the thought never occured to me of how I would be able to teach it, and I went on to explain this very thing, that I had learnt it beyond the four stages, that it would be difficult to explain but effortless for me to do, and it would be better to learn from another person who is learning kickups too. Nevertheless I think I managed to teach kickups to the group of people.
IN driving, I am in stage 2/3 in normal driving, changing gear, moving about etc. Being aware of the stages makes it easier to classify which learnign stage you are currently at, and therefore become more aware of your own ignorance as plato said. There is a fine line between not knowing something, and knowing something, and the rest is just repetition, to get up through the stages. Because as the saying goes; it is easy when you know how.
