The question posed by my title reflects the disapproving, even accusatory, tone of the original: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a communist?” This may seem an extreme point of comparison to choose for a paper about language teaching, but it does seem to be the case currently that anyone in our field daring to call themselves ‘developers’, as opposed to ‘teachers’, or ‘trainers’, would be asking for trouble, because they would be claiming to be able to do something that everyone else around would think thoroughly misguided and misconceived - to be able to develop other people. This censorious attitude is derived from the claim that development, unlike training in particular, is something that you can only do for and to yourself. No one, the argument runs, can do it to you, whereas training, virtually by definition, is something you can do to other people. I believe this claim about the nature of development is fundamentally true, but only insofar as all learning can only be done, ultimately, by the learner. The argument cannot therefore serve usefully to distinguish development from any other sort of learning. To attempt to do that requires, unfortunately, yet another look at the much visited problem of the definition of terms in this area. This is what I therefore now propose to do, with some trepidation. I will take as my starting points five descriptive propositions about learning, move on to three practical definitions to facilitate discussion about training education and development, and conclude with one prescriptive proposition about training, education, and development programmes.

Five descriptive propositions about learning

1. Learning can aim at the acquisition of  technical competence, and/or of  information, and/or of  understanding.

Here I am doing little more than picking up the standard distinctions in the field, and could perhaps have used the more colloquial ‘knowing how’, ‘knowing that’, and ‘knowing why’, except that these phrases pose awkward problems when you try to fit them into a range of sentence structures. I believe we need at least these three types of knowing to enable us to make satisfactory and useful distinctions between training, education, and development.

2. Learning, of any sort, can only be done by the learner.

I would like to take this claim for granted, as a commonplace in our field. Whatever we think about whether or not we can ‘teach’ someone something, none of us would argue that we can sensibly learn it for them. That they have to do for themselves.

3. Learning, of any sort, can nevertheless be facilitated by learning management activities.

Here I am proposing a crucial distinction between doing learning, which I have already claimed can only be done by learners themselves, and managing learning, which can also be done by others. By managing learning I mean to refer to all those things that can be done to make it more likely, though never inevitable, that learning itself will also get done. Managing learning is, strictly speaking, neither necessary nor sufficient. That is to say, we can easily find examples of learning that does not seem to have been managed in any obvious way, so management cannot be strictly necessary. For example, we get to know other people’s faces without usually ever making even a mental note for ourselves about what they look like. And sometimes we organise ourselves to ask a question (say asking the way in the street) and seconds later we have no idea of what we were told. And yet we also know that, if we wish to take the trouble, we can make it more likely that we will remember people’s faces by making mental notes about them, or even by studying their photographs.

4. Learning management activities can be provided by others as well as by learners themselves.

I wish to propose that the doing learning/managing learning distinction is crucial precisely because it is evident that it is only in the management of learning that there is a potential role for other people. This role may or may not be facilitative in practice, of course, whatever the intentions that lie behind it.

5. Learning management activities provided by others may be provided on their terms, or on terms set by the learners themselves, or on terms negotiated between them and the providers.

If I go to a college and register for a course of instruction, say in motorcycle maintenance, or French for beginners, then it is most likely that the course will be provided strictly on the providers’ terms. I am not likely to have any say in when the class meets, let alone how much time it occupies per week, or how many fellow students I will have to learn to get along with. All these are aspects of learning management that I would expect to leave to the institution to determine. I would probably also expect the instructor to have already decided precisely what the course was going to try to cover, and what method would be adopted to help me learn all the material covered. If I decide to upgrade my word-processing skills, however, I may find it more convenient to buy a manual and sort things out for myself. Some people seem even to prefer learning such things by trial and error. But, even if I use a manual, I do not need to let it take all my learning management decisions for me.

Three practical definitions to facilitate discussion of training, education and development
 

1. Typically, but not criterially, learning management activities intended primarily to facilitate the acquisition of technical competence are provided by others on their terms.  This is what we typically call TRAINING.
2. Typically, but not criterially, learning management activities intended primarily to facilitate the acquisition of information are also provided on the providers’ terms, but with greater scope for self-management on the part of the learner(s). This is what we typically call EDUCATION.
3. Typically, learning management activities intended primarily to facilitate the acquisition of understanding are provided by, or on the (normally negotiable) terms of, the people who wish to enhance their understanding. This is what we typically call DEVELOPMENT.

One prescriptive proposition about programmes

Training, education, and development programmes, to be practically worthwhile, must each provide for the facilitation of at least two of the three notions of technical competence, information, and understanding, one of which must be understanding.

Looking for the underlying concepts: three ways of knowing

 In trying to find a satisfactory conceptual basis for making a distinction between my three terms, I have been inexorably drawn to the conclusion that only the notion of ‘different ways of knowing’ offers genuine conceptual  help. Everything seems in the last analysis to be non-criterial, more a matter of practicalities than of fundamental underlying concepts. To justify this rather bold claim, however, I need to start with my conclusion, and deal with the three ‘different ways of knowing’ that I think will help us: knowing how, knowing that, and knowing why. The first of these is often referred to, in product terms, as ‘procedural knowledge’, because it is knowledge that enables us to do things skilfully, things like driving a car, or typing using a word-processing programme. The term I wish to use for it here, mostly in the hope of avoiding the connotations of other people’s terms, is technical competence. The second way of knowing is otherwise often referred to as declarative knowledge, because it is knowledge that can be stated in propositional terms, like “December 25th is Christmas Day”, and “Teachers tend to talk for at least 66% of class time”. My own term for this category, here, is information. These first two categories are reasonably well enough established in the literature but the third is much more difficult to write about, given the philosophical complexities of the issues involved in the underlying notion of ‘explanation’. I can here only try to equate it with the term understanding, in the hope that the inevitable ambiguities of that term will still not prevent the sympathetic reader (at least) from seeing a conceptual distinction worth making between this and the other two concepts.

The relationship between ways of knowing and the labels we use for real-world activities

 These three ways of knowing can now be plotted against our original terms training, education and development. But, first, to emphasise our interest in process as well as in product, it may be as well to add the notion of learning alongside that of knowing.
 
 

At first sight this plotting of the concepts against their ‘real-world’ counterparts seems quite neat, as is indicated by the apparent reasonableness, I suggest, of the +s in the downward diagonal boxes. It does seem fairly uncontroversial, not to say entirely obvious, that training is about technical competence, for example, and so on. But in fact, for me at least, as soon as we do move on, to education, we have to pause, because the notion of education as being something exclusively concerned with information is clearly a very impoverished one. In my own work as an academic teacher, working with experienced language teachers who want to ‘know’ more about their profession, I would wish to put understanding at least on an equal footing with information. And when we move to development, it may seem reasonable to make understanding  the priority, but we have learned from management studies that it has proved quite unhelpful to invest in development for understanding if the requisite level of technical competence is not simultaneously assured. And finally, if we then return to training  we may now wish to suggest that technical competence is also of very limited value, unless it is accompanied by the requisite level of understanding.

The match is not so very neat, then, when we analyse it a little, between the conceptual terms and the ‘real-world’ labels we give to human activities. This, I believe, is at the origin of many rather fruitless discussions about the essential differences between the activities described by these labels. People have tried to make conceptual definitions fit the ‘real-world’ labels, and got into a conceptual muddle in the process.

A new analysis of learning, plus the issue of ‘who’s in charge’

At this point we have a choice. We can either revise our concept of training to cover the notion that it needs now to include other ways of knowing and learning, or, if we are to hold on to our concept of training  as something exclusively concerned with technical competence, we can say that training  programmes, in the real world must be directly associated somehow with education and development programmes if they are not to be dangerously impoverished. Perhaps it does not matter greatly which way we look at it, but this is an issue we shall need to return to later.

The above analysis has deliberately left out of account a major feature which is often held to distinguish crucially between training and development. This is the notion of who is in charge  of the process. Many people would wish to argue that development is different precisely because it is necessarily self-directed. It is perfectly reasonable to claim to have trained  someone, so the argument goes, but it would be an abuse of the language, and, more importantly, of the facts of the matter, to claim to have developed  someone. While this is probably intuitively appealing, I consider it to be unhelpful as any part of a conceptual  definition. To justify this new contention I need to go back to the notion of learning and start a new set of distinctions. The first one is the conceptually clear (to me at least) but operationally tricky distinction between doing  learning and managing  learning. By doing  learning I mean to refer to whatever processes constitute the central mental events of what we call learning - whatever it is that happens in our heads that ends up with us knowing something, in at least one of the three ways outlined before, that we did not know before. These processes may or may not benefit from acts of learning management. This notion of acts of learning management  deserves to be interpreted very broadly, from, for example, a learner deciding in class to ask a question, to a national school system adopting and enforcing a national curriculum. It is crucial to my notion of learning management, however, that acts of learning management  are not a prerequisite for the doing of learning. For example, when I leave this conference I will have learned to recognise a considerable number of faces that were previously completely unknown to me. I can reliably predict that that will happen because it always does. But I have never had to give it a moment’s thought. I do not need to do anything to make it happen. And yet, at the same time, if I do want to make sure I remember someone’s face, then of course there are things I can do to manage that particular bit of learning and make it more likely to happen effectively. I can, for example, try to attend to the person’s face in a more analytic way than I would otherwise, and perhaps create verbal descriptions of it for myself. Whatever I do, it seems clear to me that, just because nothing I do can guarantee success, then I do crucially need a clear conceptual distinction between managing learning and actually doing  it.

The two examples of learning management that I used above will also serve to introduce the other distinction I now need to introduce here - between self  and other. From what I have already said it is obvious, I hope, that my notion of doing  learning is of something only the learner can do, and it is indeed almost a cliché in our field that whatever else you can do to help people learn, you cannot actually do the learning for them. But it should be equally obvious that the management  of learning can, on the other hand, be seen as either self- or other-directed (or as partly one, partly the other, of course).

Perhaps this will now give us a principled basis for distinguishing between training, education  and development. We might then be happy with the diagrammatic representation below, where the role for self-management increases from left to right. 
 
 

Problems with the location of management as a criterial attribute

Personally, however, I find this representation owes more to a descriptive approach to the real-world  labels, than to an analytical approach to the underlying concepts. To start with, for example, although I recognise that training courses in the real world tend to be massively managed by their providers, and for reasons which do, to the providers at least, seem endemic to the process of training, I also need to insist that I consider myself perfectly capable of training myself, at least for some purposes. There are at least some technical competences (like word-processing) the acquisition of which I can manage myself. In the process I may well need recourse to outside resources (like a decent manual), but I do not need to let the manual manage  my learning for me. Conversely, at the other end of the scale, although I may be able to manage my own development without asking anyone to intervene, it may at some point appeal to me to put myself in the hands of someone who will push me around somewhat, perhaps by catching me out when I am guilty of sloppy thinking, and putting me through some rigorous exercises to help me make sure it happens less often in the future. Of course I may negotiate with my logic tutor to agree the terms on which I am prepared to undertake the exercise programme, or I may simply put myself at my tutor’s mercy.

My point is simply, of course, that I can see no reason in principle to use the location of management as a criterial attribute for distinguishing between training, education, and development. The choice of self- or other-management is best seen, I believe, as only a real-world choice that we will make for practical real-world reasons. So, to concretise the analysis a little, if I choose to train  myself to touch-type then I must not call that development  just because I manage the process myself, and if I choose to develop  myself by asking someone to lead me through a ‘straight and crooked thinking’ programme they have devised then that is not to be called training just because I leave them to exercise full control of its management.

 In practice, of course, there is probably no one who seriously denies the role of the self in managing learning on a training course, however top-down the course may be, and no one is likely to deny that education is also in some important sense a co-production. The exception seems to be development, for which people do claim that it is, by definition for them, something you can only do for yourself. I can accept this last point, of course, but only, as I noted at the beginning, in the sense that it is necessarily true of the doing  of learning of any type. That simple  and inescapable fact does not mean that the management  of development learning is also something with which no-one can help you.

Facilitation as a potential solution.

But am I guilty myself of slipping too easily between conceptual definitions and real-world issues? My above argument would probably have been more convincing if it had had, instead of the real-world labels, the three ways of knowing and learning across the top, as below.
 
 

The other and/or self  phrase indicates the openness of the practical choice here, and this very openness entails that the distinction is strictly irrelevant to the concept itself. With this diagram it might be more obvious that the choice between other- or self-direction is essentially a practical matter only. The argument may also be helped along invoking the notion of the facilitation of learning. If we can agree that the doing of learning is essentially by the self, then we can probably also agree that there is always, in principle, a potential role for other people who may be able to facilitate the process of management of learning, and perhaps thereby make it more likely to lead the actual doing of learning.

One final, further, practical notion: the terms on which facilitation is provided

This introduction of the notion of facilitation should not be allowed, however, without at least some consideration of the observation that I have now shifted my ground considerably from when I put it in terms of the notion of who is in charge. Another way of putting this is to ask: on whose terms is the training, education, or development being undertaken? Here we do have, I believe, an important ‘real-world’ consideration that may help us in our discussions, although it will play no part, I will have to insist, in a truly conceptual definition.

 When we talk of training in the real-world, we use the term typically to refer to activities that are mainly concerned with technical competence and that are offered on the provider’s terms. This does not prevent a large element of self-management of whatever learning takes place during training programmes, and it cannot, of course, alter the fact that the doing of the learning can only be done by the trainees themselves. Education, as we commonly use the term, is similarly offered on the provider’s terms (as in state school systems), and facilitated by trained managers of learning (the teachers), but again the learning can only be done by the learners themselves. Which leaves development, and here we may now feel we can reasonably say that we want to use the term exclusively to refer to activities that are to be provided (if ‘provided’ is appropriate at all) only on the developing person’s terms, even if the activities involved are facilitated by others.

Returning to the criterial/non-criterial attributes issue

This sorting out, however, will leave us in trouble if we now go back to our original discussion and take seriously the point that, for example, training courses in the real world seem to crucially need a developmental  element, in the sense that the acquisition of technical competence needs, as we saw at the beginning, to be accompanied by at least some level of understanding, if the programme is to be worthwhile. If, in the real-world, we intend to introduce such a developmental element into a training course, does this mean it can only be done strictly on the trainees’ terms for it to be properly developmental? In practice I believe we would have to say ‘no’. The providers of training programmes need to also provide, on their terms, activities that are conducive to understanding, and thus to development.

The main conclusion: the conceptual centrality of ways of knowing

In conclusion then, I think it may be helpful to try to hold on to the three ways of knowing as the only validly conceptual set of distinctions in this area. We can then argue cogently that a training course in the real world, for example, will not be complete unless it offers help with more than one way of knowing, but that the fact that someone other than the trainees is in charge of it does not mean that a developmental  element is a logical impossibility. We will also be able to argue that a group of teachers who decide to pursue their own development by making use of the services of a professional facilitator (or simply by making use of each other in this role) are not thereby guilty of betraying the essential principle of development.
 

Epilogue: who would a developer be?

So, finally, is it conceivable that someone in our field could one day be called a developer? I do believe so, if by that we could come to mean someone whose role it is to facilitate development, just as when we call someone a trainer, we normally mean simply that he or she has the role of facilitating the acquisition of technical competence, however effectively or ineffectively that role may be performed (it is worth noting in passing). And when we call someone a teacher, we also simply mean (at least when we have an academic context in mind) someone whose role it is to facilitate the acquisition of information, again regardless of how well or badly that role is performed. If we still cannot, in the meantime, bring ourselves to call anyone a developer, let us at least remember that this is not necessarily because we can see absolutely no role for other people in anyone’s development. 

A final attempt at simplification

In conclusion it may be helpful to try to reduce the above convoluted prose to a set of propositions and practical definitions, as listed below.

SIX FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS ABOUT LEARNING.

1. Learning can aim at the acquisition of technical competence, and/or of information, and/or of understanding.
2. Learning, of any sort, can only be done by the learner.
3. Learning, of any sort, can nevertheless be facilitated by learning management activities.
4. Learning management activities can be provided by others as well as by learners themselves.
5. Learning management activities provided by others may be provided on their terms or on terms set by the learners themselves, or on terms negotiated between them and the providers.
6. In practice, training, education, and development programmes, to be effective, must all provide for the facilitation of more than one way of knowing.

Three practical (but conceptually flawed) definitions
 

1. Typically, but not criterially, learning management activities intended primarily to facilitate the acquisition of technical competence are provided by others on their terms. This is what we typically call TRAINING.
2. Typically, but not criterially, learning management activities intended primarily to facilitate the acquisition of information are also provided on the providers’ terms, but with greater scope for self-management on the part of the learner. This is what we typically call (academic) EDUCATION.
3. Typically, learning management activities intended primarily to facilitate the acquisition of understanding are provided by, or on the (normally negotiable) terms of, the people who wish to enhance their understanding. This is what we typically call DEVELOPMENT.

Notes

1. This article is based on an invited paper presented at the International Conference on Teacher Training and Development at Bilkent University, Turkey in 1996. (back)

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