What cooking can teach us about learning & reflective practice

(5 mine read)

Over the past 7-8 years, cooking has become a real passion of mine.  I really enjoy having time in the evening or weekend to prepare a delicious meal for the family. And for me, it is as much about the process as the outcome.  However, my cooking has only really improved in the last 4-5 years.  Before then, while I still enjoyed cooking, it was all recipe based and often would be quite bland.  The reason was I simply didn’t really know how to cook.  I didn’t understand what foods complimented each other nor how to balance the dishes.  Not until I went on a Thai cookery course.  It changed the way I viewed cooking and have been on countless other cookery courses since to continue to improve.  I started to understand and appreciate the five flavours of salt, sweat, sour, bitter and maybe most importantly umami (a savouriness to give a depth of flavour).  With this greater understanding, it provided a structure for me to develop my cooking skills.  As I progressed, I could start to experiment away from recipes and start supplementing ingredients I didn’t have at home without compromising the flavour.  While I am by no way an expert, I have become more autonomous when I cook.

I share this anecdote as the same can idea of structure and autonomy applies to learning and reflective practice.  It is hard to be deliberate in both if we are not fully aware how best to undertake it.  This may sound contradictory in that we are always learning and reflecting on every part of our existence, but to truly turn events into experiences, we need develop deliberate frameworks or mental models to follow.  

This is where the idea of structure and autonomy originates.  When we first navigate a more deliberate model to learning or reflective practice, we need a lot more structure to guide us.  It maybe new and feel unnatural, requiring practice.  Like a recipe which provides the ingredients and step by step instructions needed to make a dish, learning and reflective practice frameworks will also provide the methods and process to be more deliberate.  The degree of autonomy we have is still quite low.  Within cooking, different ingredients can achieve the same outcome in attaining one of the five desired flavours. This applies to learning too.  Once we understand the principles behind learning and reflective practice, we can start to adapt them to meet our personal needs by creating our own mental models.  We then start to become more autonomous, becoming less dependent of the early structures that facilitated the initial insights and action.  The beauty of this model is it provides the foundation to understand the principles and then allow us to adapt them to our specific needs.  As we progress our models, we may access expertise to aid our development.  From the cooking anecdote above, this was a cookery class, for learning and reflective practice, this maybe some form of mentoring or peer support.  

There will always be a degree of structure to our deliberate learning and reflective practices; the very act of developing a mental model is a liberating structure that continues to allow us to turn events into experiences.  However, more formal structures will exist such as the provision and flow of a learning experiences we attend.  The early structures (i.e. the recipe book) still remain and can always fall back on them when we are stuck with a tricky problem or decision to make.  Often under pressure, we are more likely to become fixed in our mindset which can debilitate our learning and reflective practice models.  During these times, the stability of the structured approach maybe enough to overcome the challenge and return to the autonomous mental models.  Finally, its worth pointing out that umami is to Thai cooking as action orientation is to learning and reflective practice.  Anchoring learning to the first step we can take is opportunistic and future focus, allowing us to apply our new acquired insight, knowledge of experience.

Understanding where we are on the structure-autonomy framework will facilitate and expediate us applying autonomous learning and reflective practices.  It will allow us to identify what structures are useful and develop personal preferences and ways of working (mental models) which will amplify our ability to apply the new learnings.  It’s ok to recognise we need more structure in these areas – this is first component addressed in every leadership and people development programme I’ve been involved in.  Without a good grasp on this, we can quickly become lost or disinterested resulting in a missed opportunity of growth and development.

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