Why lectures don't work.
"Lectures don’t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model. It’s (implicitly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn—transmissionism—which we can caricaturize as “lecturer says words describing an idea; students hear words; then they understand.” When lectures do work, it’s generally as part of a broader learning context (e.g. projects, problem sets) with a better cognitive model. But the lectures aren’t pulling their weight. If we really wanted to adopt the better model, we’d ditch the lectures, and indeed, that’s what’s been happening in US K–12 education."
Why books don't work
"In this section we’ve seen that, like lectures, non-fiction books don’t work because they lack a functioning cognitive model. Instead, like lectures, they’re (accidentally, invisibly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn: transmissionism. When books do work, it’s generally for readers who deploy skillful metacognition to engage effectively with the book’s ideas. This kind of metacognition is unavailable to many readers and taxing for the rest. Books aren’t pulling their weight. Textbooks do more to help, but they still foist most of the metacognition onto the reader, and they ignore many important ideas about how people learn."
Here's his credentials:
Earned his B.A. from Duke University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University in 1990. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992.
Great article. Not just for its crisp analysis of what Nadella did wrong, but even more so for how he could have expressed his thoughts clearly and gotten it right.
Covey would probably encourage you to understand the insecurities of these people and address them in a more positive way. Your mileage from his advice may vary.
