Learning Is Everywhere

Connection, Experience and Taking Learning Beyond the Training Room

Mike’s Monthly Thoughts and Reflections

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the Namaste Care International Conference. What stayed with me was not simply the information shared, but the way people, stories, music and ideas connected. It reminded me that learning rarely arrives in one neat package. It happens through people, experience, reflection and the things that touch both the brain and the heart.

The conference also resonated with the way I have always approached training. I use music, images, stories, discussion, objects and practical activity, and where possible I involve people with lived experience. I want learners to encounter ideas in different ways, not simply sit and receive information.

David Sheard, whose feelings-led approach to dementia care has influenced my own work, spoke at the conference. Sam Dodd-Smith used threads as a metaphor for human connection. Different speakers offered different perspectives, yet the common thread for me was connection: with ideas, with experience and, most importantly, with people.

Different Ways of Learning

As a trainer I am fascinated by how people learn. Honey and Mumford described four learning preferences: Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist (Honey and Mumford, 1986). I often use TRAP as a simple way of remembering them. I find the framework useful as a reminder to vary learning activities, although I do not see people as fixed “types”.

Research has also questioned how strongly the four categories can be validated, so for me the practical message is simple: offer variety, choice and opportunities to learn in different ways.

That is why my courses include discussion, reflection, case studies, stories, practical activity, visual material and written resources. Kolb’s experiential learning model also reminds us that experience becomes learning through a continuing cycle of experience, reflection, making sense of what happened and trying something in practice (Kolb, 1984).

I picture this as a clothes rail. Throughout a course I hang up lots of different coat-hangers: a story, a question, a mnemonic, an image, a discussion, an idea or a practical tool. Nobody will remember everything. Different people will take away different things because something connected with their role, experience or curiosity. The choice is theirs. That, for me, is part of learner-centred training.

Learning With and From Each Other

There is still something special about people coming together to learn. A course is not only an exchange between trainer and learner. Learners bring knowledge, experience and questions of their own, and often learn from one another.

This is why I developed the Study Buddy approach many years ago. Learners pair up during the day to share one thing they have learned and one thing they intend to do differently.

At the end, they can exchange contact details if they want to continue supporting each other. The idea is simple: reflection and conversation help learning travel beyond the training room.

Beyond the Training Day

One concern throughout my career has been the idea that training is a one-off event: people attend a course, collect information and return to work. The more important question is what happens next. What gets discussed, tried, adapted and embedded in everyday practice?

That is why I now build follow-on resources into Mike Phillips Training courses. The Learner Workbook supports learning during and after the day. The INSPIRE Learning Guide, Building Knowledge for Better Practice, provides deeper information to revisit afterwards. The Companion Toolkit, Tools for Turning Learning into Practice, offers practical tools, prompts and activities to help translate ideas into action.

Coaching+ is another part of that approach. It provides optional follow-up support after training, creating space for learners or managers to reflect on what is working, explore obstacles and decide what to try next. The purpose is not to extend a course for the sake of it. It is to help learning become useful practice.

The People Who Continue to Teach Us

Of course, some of our most enduring learning never came from a course at all. I often think about my great-grandfather, Pop. I saw him as a wise man. He would puff on his pipe and say something that, to me as a child, seemed to carry years of experience.

Before the First World War, he travelled from South Wales to the United States for work. My cousin later gave me one of the postcards he sent home to my great-grandmother. On the front is a picture of a car, still novel enough for Pop to explain that this remarkable machine was called an “automobile”. That postcard reminds me how much change one lifetime can contain.

Pop taught me lessons I still carry. So have colleagues, people with dementia and their families, learners, care workers, mentors and friends. Learning is not simply something delivered to us by an expert. It is woven through relationships and experiences, often appearing when we are paying attention rather than when we are consciously trying to learn.

Seeing the Ripples

One frustration of being a trainer is that I do not always get to see what happens afterwards. Then, during a course in September, I met someone who had attended an earlier dementia course. They told me how they had put the learning into practice and described some of the ideas it had sparked.

I was overjoyed. It felt like seeing the ripples after throwing a pebble into a pool. Much of the time, my role is to throw the pebble and trust that something may happen beyond my view. Managers and Learning Partners then have an important role in keeping those ripples moving by creating opportunities to discuss, practise, reflect and improve.

Final Reflections

This month I keep returning to two connected ideas. The first is that learning is everywhere: in conferences, conversations, stories, mistakes, books, colleagues, people we support and people who have shaped our lives. The second is that learning should not end at the training room door.

My job is not to decide which coat-hanger every learner should take. It is to create a rich enough rail for people to find something meaningful, then provide ways for that learning to be revisited and used. The real measure is not what somebody remembers from a slide. It is what changes afterwards.

Pop’s wisdom still stays with me. People who have influenced my work still shape the way I train. Learners continue to teach me. And sometimes I am fortunate enough to glimpse the ripples.

Perhaps the question for all of us is not simply, “What training have I completed?” but “What have I learned, who have I learned it from, and what will I do differently because of it?”

Over to you to Release Your Potential

References

• Honey, P. and Mumford, A. (1986). Using Your Learning Styles. Maidenhead: Peter Honey.
• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Editorial note: Learning-style models are used here as a prompt for variety rather than as a claim that learners belong to fixed types. Swailes and Senior (1999) reported limited evidence for the construct validity of the Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire.

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