015 – The White Belt Experience

In this episode I explore learning and teaching techniques in the martial arts, from the perspective of the beginning student and from the perspective of the experienced instructor. I extract a number of important training principles from this exercise that I hope to incorporate in the Argument Ninja training program.

In This Episode:

  • Review: What is “Rational Persuasion”? (2:30)
  • Reminder: Our Children Are Watching (7:20)
  • The White Belt Experience (10:00)
  • Training for Skill Development: Analysis, Synthesis, Repetition, and Internalization (13:00)
  • Training for Combat: Objectives, Strategy and Tactics (17:30)
  • Training Through Time: Cumulative, Incremental Progress (25:15)
  • Training with Inspiration: “Beginner’s Mind” (30:30)
  • Summing Up (37:45)
  • The Instructional Design Challenge (39:00)
  • How Classroom Teachers Solve It (42:10)
  • The Value of a Belt Level System (44:00)
  • How You Can Support the Podcast and the Argument Ninja Program (46:25)
  • Book Me For a Speaking Gig (48:30)

Quotes:

“What’s it going to look like when we’ve raised an entire generation who has been taught that political citizenship isn’t about critically engaging with political ideas, but rather about finding a tribe that gives you a sense of belonging and identity, and adopting the officially sanctioned beliefs of that tribe? What’s it going to look like if our children have no appreciation of how propaganda and the influence industry have shaped their thinking, because they’ve never been shown how the psychology of influence works, or how it can undermine critical judgment, or even what critical judgment is supposed to look like?”

” There is a difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is the broader concept. It’s the master plan that creates the conditions for engagement and how the objective is to be realized. But the fight is ultimately won through a set of tactical moves that progressively lead you to your goal. Tactics are the means by which you implement a strategy.”

“[Rational persuasion is] not something you should expect to learn out of a book, even though books may be helpful. You can’t learn it out of a book for the very same reason that you can’t learn martial arts out of a book, or how to drive a car out of a book, or how to be a good teacher, or a good scientist, out of a book. These are things we do, we perform, and they require time and practice to learn.”


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This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Hi Kevin,

    In a previous life, I worked for a networking company. Networking can be as simple as two devices connected directly together to an incredibly complex network for a worldwide organization. It even gets worse – there are a lot of vendors of networking equipment and often times, any network with any age at all will have devices from multiple vendors. These devices must be able to communicate with each other and work together well so that a network administrator can function as a normal human being (not likely!).

    A company introducing new networking products for businesses has a couple of immediate problems:
    • How do I get the support staff trained to handle support calls with our products?
    • How do I get networking personnel who work for these companies trained on our products?

    The industry’s solution to this problem has been through “Certification Programs”. Probably the most valuable certification in the networking business is the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert or CCIE. It represents the logical endpoint of a path from Entry to Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) to a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), to the CCIE. Nowadays, due to complexity, these are specialized in certain technologies as well as business functions (e.g., CCNA wireless, CCNP Service Provider, etc.…)

    There also exists a tension: The tougher the certification exam, the less certified people there are. The less certified people there are, the less likely a customer will be able to hire someone with expertise, or get their existing support personnel adequately trained. On the flip side, the easier the certification exam, the more people that will be certified, but the more likely these certifications won’t mean a lot because the bar is too low. An additional problem: there is an “Answer Industry”. A group of companies who regularly publish the answers to most these certification exams for a price. Hence, there is almost an evolutionary arms race between the Certification Industry and the Certification Answer Industry.

    The CCIE certification gets around this problem by forcing you to go into a lab and be given an assignment and work through that assignment in front of lab monitors. This is a very hard test even for seasoned Cisco engineers. However, other exams do not have this “hands on” and the Certification Industry has to deal with Certification Answer Industry. The Certification Industry has been focused on simulations and other “almost hands on approaches” in an attempt to get around easy answers.

    Lastly, on the plus side, the popularity of these certifications, bandwidth increases, and remote technology mean that online learning is becoming a much better experience than it used to be.

    I think you’ll have some variation of all of these in an Argument Ninja training program. For example, you’ll want to leverage online learning expertise, you’ll want to take fundamental steps against the “Answer Industry”, and so forth.

    Let’s do a hypothetical example for an Argument Ninja training program. We’ll do a simple Level-0 through Level-9, where Level-0 is entry and Level-9 is expert. To achieve the scalability you want, you’ll need an instructor path and a student path. An instructor must be at least one level above the one they want to teach and will likely need to be an awesome student as well. I would restrict student sign up to a locality. For instance, I live in Arizona and having instructors that are local to the Phoenix or Tucson area would be very beneficial. I say this because although remote technologies allow for instructors to be anywhere, having teachers/students in the same time zone and having a similar background really helps learning. In addition, as a step against the Answer Industry, I would have students go and physically interact with instructor(s) to achieve Level-X certification (e.g., a panel review). Achieving this physical interaction requires a local instructors and some travel time on the part of students. Optionally, this physical interaction would also allow for a picture and certification number to be assigned and easily checked publicly. This step would help prevent individuals from falsely claiming to be an Argument Ninja and steer people in the wrong direction (not to mention, create bad publicity for the program).

    Just some thoughts and I do hope you succeed in this endeavor!

    1. Thanks for these thoughtful replies and suggestions Clay! This an interesting hybrid model you’re describing (face-to-face interaction with online interaction).

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