Examples of how repertory grid with Enquire Within makes its contribution, which is often unique or difficult to obtain by other means, to the factors essential to effective learning.

Enquire Within has the capacity to help with each of the factors essential for effective learning.

Information

Here we mean information in its broadest sense, which is meant to include opinions, perceptions, and feelings.

Enquire Within is a content-free process, and in itself carries no information. In fact I named it Enquire Within in a fit of anger after looking at a CD-ROM encyclopedia and thinking that soon all most people will know about Beethoven is what the CDs tell them (justified anger - there have been reports recently that the French versions carry a very different account of Waterloo than the British ones). How Enquire Within enhances information goes like this:

The second and third stages feel like being in a self-imposed quiz, but without any time pressure or anyone passing judgments. What can happen then is any or the following:

What’s important to note is that these additional stages – in effect, summoning help – all happen at the margin of the user’s knowledge. The program ensures that users only search for the additional knowledge which they know they need. So it eliminates a great deal of redundancy in classroom teaching sessions. All students are looking for what they know they need to know, because their inner enquiries have told them so.

Example: a lawyer with an interest in miscarriages of justice is using Enquire Within to develop her understanding of the circumstances associated with injustices. In particular, she wants to see if there are any patterns which could be used to predict or detect them early. First she did a ‘brain-dump’ of what she already knew. The program’s analysis then pointed out the areas where, if she agreed, she needed more clarification. So she searched her memory more intensively and added that information to the program. The program then pointed out more areas where clarification could help. At this stage she was able to interrogate colleagues and text-books, knowing exactly what she needed to ask. Had she been linked to a database, she could have asked it to search that also.

Motivation and Purpose

Enquire Within will not generate these where they do not exist and have no hope of development. But where they are present to some degree, Enquire Within helps in a number of ways:

Example: a political scientist is using Enquire Within for what is, effectively, an exercise in scenario planning. For him it’s real: it’s his country and he’s deeply involved in what’s happening. The process of governance has been through a series of heavy reforms in its own right. Then the people voted to change to a system of proportional representation, which placed the balance of power in the hands of a new party: some Ministers had never even been MPs before. Chaos is predicted. The only question is ‘ what kind, and when?’. The political scientist configured some appropriate Enquire Within sessions, which in effect have mapped the political system. He is now using its capacity to ask ‘what if?’ questions to examine the possible effects of changes in different variables.

The Right Conditions for Learning

The program lets you do it your way, whatever that might be. The architecture of the program is such that once you have set up the basic session, you can do almost anything you want in any order. You can follow a trail, or leave it for later. You can be as structured or as unstructured as you like. Furthermore, in the examples and tutorials we have already prepared, we suggest ways in which classroom teachers can get the whole class involved.

Example: we have a session whose purpose is to allow the teacher to explore how different students view the same subject-matter, and to explore whether the students mean the same thing by the terms they use. This works in almost any study environment, but it is particularly thought-provoking when the subject-matter and the terms people use to describe it are abstract and/or subjective – for example, music, art, literature. A music teacher has used it to help students explore how different conductors achieve their own particular ‘signature’, for example.

Enquire Within contains a group of prepared sessions which are designed to help users explore the conditions under which they learn best – in effect, their own ‘learning styles’ questionnaire but without the imposition of an external model. There is one session in which they are guided to reflect on situations in their past where, in retrospect, they learned something important. Another explores formal situations which they tried to learn something, and the factors associated with failure and success. Another related session explores their mentors and what they learned from them. These sessions never fail to be rich in insights, and I would recommend them to anyone about to start a serious study programme.

Feedback

The program has instant feedback built in. Indeed, it depends on feedback for generating some of its key insights, for example:

Example: Enquire Within can be used to diagnose training needs and to measure change after training. It is a tool for the evaluation of training. It is particularly impactful and easy to understand when the subject-matter is factual, but it can be extended to cover skills-based training. I did a simple before-and-after session with someone who had gone on a course on psychological testing. Before the course, he could name very few tests, had very few way of distinguishing between them, and some of what he said was factually inaccurate. After the course he knew more tests, more ways of distinguishing between them, and made fewer errors. Where the knowledge is objective, the process could almost be automated – especially if there were access to an ‘expert’ Grid with which to compare the answers. Proper evaluation of training has hardly been possible until now. Enquire Within makes it possible, accurate, quantifiable, and learner-centred.

Introspection

Finally, learning requires the capacity for introspection. People vary in the capacity they have for self-examination: there is probably a scale where one end is defined by those who have learned the Jesuits’ spiritual exercises, and the other by Margaret Thatcher. Enquire Within is guided introspection. It is the facility to have a conversation with oneself, perhaps in the presence of another if you wish. Repertory Grid is a conversation, and one where in most cases the journey matters more than the arrival (i.e. the process is far more important than the finished Grid).

Let us not promise the earth. There are some people who will never learn the capacity for introspection, because they are frightened that if they look inside they will find that there’s nothing there. But most people can be encouraged to agree with Socrates’ proposition that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’

Enquire Within helps people practise introspection in two ways. One is that each session is a conversation with oneself. The second is that as you get used to it, the generic skills of introspection (and, by implication, learning to learn) grow as if by osmosis.

Some reasons why Enquire Within promotes introspection are:

Example: a sceptic was converted into an Enquire Within fanatic simply by doing the session about ‘looking back over times when I was trying to learn something.’ Sample quotes: ‘Under certain circumstances I blame the teacher, and sometimes that’s fair but sometimes it isn’t (and I know how the circumstances differ).’ ‘I hate to admit it, but I really do need to read the manual.’ ‘There are some circumstances where I should simply have stopped, got out, – instead of damaging myself with false pride’. The important point is that the user uncovered these things for herself. She wasn’t troubled enough to need counselling; she was just an ordinary person about to commit a lot of spare time to doing an MBA, and she was offered Enquire Within as a preliminary so that she could make best use of this valuable time.

Summary

We began at A Little on Learning by saying that effective learning requires: information (in its broadest sense); motivation and purpose; the right conditions (which can be environmental or the conditions addressed in ‘learning styles’ questionnaires); feedback (sought or given) and introspection. I have then given examples of how Enquire Within enhances all these factors. In some cases it does things that can’t be done any other way.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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