This week, Ray, Augusto, Francis and Art discuss learning and four stages of curiosity. Curious what they are? Listen in and learn! 😉

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In this Cast | Learning and the Four Stages of Curiosity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Learning and the Four Stages of Curiosity

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

From Procedural Knowledge To Self Knowledge: The 4 Stages Of Curiosity 

Montessori education

Raw Text Transcript

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:28Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we're going to be talking about what we're calling the four stages of curiosity. And it actually came out from an article that Francis Wade had come across. And so Francis, do you want to kind of open us up in terms of this topic today. And then we'll get into a little bit of our agenda.

Francis Wade 0:46Sure, it has to do with knowledge acquisition or learning, the idea is pretty straightforward that you move from initially taking directions from someone who is an expert, someone who knows a lot more than you do. And you graduate from the bottom level to the point where you need to essentially create your own knowledge in order to make progress. Because there's lots of areas that we want to know something a lot about. If you get stuck at any one level, it'll the idea of the article is that if you get stuck at any one level, then it will actually for your development. So the idea is to notice when it's time to move to the next level, and then use the techniques that are appropriate for that low in order to keep making progress in the chosen area of interest. The concept that was provided was done in the in the form of a diagram, and we're gonna go over that, but it's a pyramid. And so that pyramid diagram starts with with four levels, in essence, hence, the four stages of curiosity. And as we make our way through today, you will hear us talking about those four levels. And we will explain those very shortly. And so today, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the four stages. And just to give some preface here, the four stages are in Francis's terms here, process starting at the base of the level content, that is the next here, upper stage two, stage three is known transfer, and then stage four unknown future, let's get into the defining of the four stages. And then we'll talk about each of the stages in order. For instance, do you want to give us a little bit of background in terms of the items here that you've noted regarding procedural knowledge, self knowledge, and curiosity, let's, let's talk about these components that you talk about curiosity. And then we can define the four stages proper, when you don't know anything about the topic. And it involves actually doing something, not just knowledge acquisition, the best way to learn it in the very beginning is to borrow the schema from somebody who knows something. So you want to be them to be very prescriptive. And to tell you the details of what you need to learn what they've learned, pretty much tell you what they have done. If you have no background in the item, you've never done it before the actual you haven't done it before, it's brand new to you, the best place to go learn is from someone who's willing to translate what expertise looks like. So they lay it out to you. So that's the first level. The second level,

Francis Wade 3:18which I call the content level, is that you gain some interest. And by the way, this is borrowed from an article on, I just want to make sure I give the kudos where they're due on teach thought that calm the four stages of curiosity. The concept isn't is new, not new to me. But it's one the four levels that they laid out are what we're basing this conversation on. So firstly, that in the show notes are great, great. The first level again, is that you just follow what someone else tells you to do. The second level is that you start to gain some interest in the topic. So you've already been able to do what they told you to do. And now you're asking questions like, Oh, why this step? Why not that step. And you start to read around what it is that they're telling you to do. And you miss go deeper into their thought system. That's typically the next step is okay. When I read the Cliff Notes version, let me actually read the book. Let me read the listen to the videos, let me hear the podcast. Let me pick up some other people who are talking about how great this idea is, other people who are expanding on it. So you're learning pretty much the same schema, but you're learning more information about the schema. And then at the third level, you know, say, I know what I know and I know what I do, how do I apply what I'm learning to what I've done in the past or what I'm doing right now. So you're know looking to make things fit and this is where most people have a bit of difficulty because there's no schema that in any field. You know, if you're learning bowling and someone teaches you the basics, is going to come up point where the basics don't really apply anymore. But what you try to do is to keep applying what you've learned to what you're doing. And as you gain more expertise, you keep trying to do that. And as you apply, you start to fail, you apply, you start to fail, you start to get to the point where you start to question what you've learned. Because it was simple. It served you at this first step. But no, at this step, you've gained some expertise, you got some hours, you've been to the bowling, I was gonna say, bowling rink, no, you've been to the bowling alley a few 100 times. And you started to see nuances and you now need to move to the next level. So the fourth level is one in which you are you understand that you need to develop your own way of doing things and your own way of thinking about what you do. You need to think about analyzing what you're doing so that you can make improvements in the future. Because as you look to the future, you see what do I when I start to enter the World Series of bullying or the World Championships, obviously, what I learned that level one won't work for me, I need a coach to point out the areas where I need improvement or if I can't afford a coach, then I'll need to examine what I'm doing so that I can analyze it for further improvements. And also to anticipate that when I get to the Olympics of bowling in the Olympics, when I get to the Olympics of bowling at that very, very high, the highest of the highest levels, then I'm going to need to keep improving. So I No need to build a bit meta and say how do I keep improving my bowling so that when I eventually get to the Olympic level, it's not just a matter of being stuck in the way I do things. But I'm able to flex and unable to adjust and be able to still continue to make progress. And we

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:53can see that in thinking about any of our ability to be productive. We're always in some stage of learning something in our world. And I think it's really interesting to have these conversations around what learning is because for most of us, we actually never learned to learn. And we just were taught things. In that passive approach, we end up not building the skills to learn how to learn. And so I really find discussions around learning how to learn just fascinating generally, because the more we learn how to learn and learn how learning happens, we're better capable of manifesting new learnings faster and more efficiently and really more effectively. So that we're capable of drawing on these to be able to move and develop faster. So let's drive in to each of these stages. Let's start with stage one, where we are basically at the beginning stages of I don't know what I don't know, I suppose. How can people build scaffolding for purposes of learning at that stage of the game?

Art Gelwicks 8:01The first two levels of this seem to be the most basically intuitive. I mean, that seems to be where we just operate as people, that you have your innate curiosity about something a new topic comes past you. And you're like, where do I start? Where do I start digging into when you think about frameworks? This is something that I think you have to do across the board is to establish where are your credible sources going to come from whatever topic you're looking at, you should be,