The back story: my wife bought me this experience for my 46th birthday. I’d never considered flying a plane before except whilst watching Top Gun and wanting to be a jet fighter pilot for about 10 minutes. I travel about 30,000 miles per year in my car. A few thousand more by train. And a couple of thousand by plane. The flying part of my job is rare and, as a result, delightfully exciting. I had no idea how well I would perform in this new classroom. But I did know how I’d been successful before. So it was a good time to put some theory into action.
The theory that I was going to utilise was regarding owning my own learning process and, more specifically, the SOLO Taxonomy. How would my learning develop and how could I take charge of my learning so that I could accelerate my own learning? My trainer, and co-pilot, was a highly experienced pilot who knew far, far more than I did (that’s good and not a particularly fantastic achievement). With 20,000 hours flying time I had confidence that this person would be able to help me out whenever I got stuck.
He took me into the briefing room, asked me a couple of questions (my prior knowledge of Bernoulli’s Principle was strong) then left me to watch a 20 minute presentation regarding the main aspects of the A320 cockpit. In terms of the SOLO Taxonomy I was building knowledge (uni to multi structural). It was actually a presentation looking at the features of a Boeing 747 so I could make notes based on the knowledge that was being given to me, and I was also given a laminated card to see how the two different cockpits compare. This was pitching my learning at the Relational level of SOLO. (At this point learning felt harder than at the uni and multi structural. I was unable to just write down stuff to meet the learning demand; instead I had to hold more in my working memory and make comparisons between this and that.) Knowing that this was meant to be harder learning helped me to cope with the demand. I felt comfortable with being uncomfortable.
After the presentation it was time to move to the actual cockpit. Whilst this was only a simulator, the cockpit was taken from a plane that had been in service. The simulator was also a motion simulator, so when the plane was deemed to be climbing, the cockpit felt like it was part of a real climbing plane. A pilot who had flown the plane from which the cockpit came had flown the simulator several times and he declared it was just like the real thing, except “it smelled better”. I spent time becoming acquainted with the cockpit controls which had only been a 2d laminated reality to me up until this point.
The first flight involved taking off from Innsbruck airport, flying at about 6000ft down the valley, navigating to a nearby airport, flying low over a lake (not desirable, but the simulator makes it a safe place to fail!) then finally landing. A future blog will look at the other things that I attempted and accomplished so that’s as far as I will go regarding the flying. But with regards the learning I have this to say.
I knew what level of SOLO I was operating at and knew how to ask questions that helped me progress to the next level. Sometimes I needed to go back to the knowledge building, at other times I tried operating at the relational level by suggesting what I thought I now knew, and how it was similar to, or different from, what I previously knew. SOLO supported me hugely through the navigating of my learning. It brought clarity and focus to what I should be attending to and I felt truly in charge of my own learning, even though my co-pilot could have no doubt taken me on a learning journey to develop my competence. However I knew what questions to ask to elicit the correct level of feedback from my trainer. I asked closed questions when it was something I was unsure about. I asked open questions when it was something that I had learned at the qualitative level of SOLO. There wasn’t a wasted minute of learning because I made visible and explicit to my trainer what I had learned and what I wanted to learn next.
My intention was to learn the basics of flying a plane. Beyond that I had planned to see how my triple-A model for building autonomy , the model of effective feedback from Hattie and Timperley, and the SOLO Taxonomy of Biggs and Collis could be used to develop my own accelerated learning. And my experience was a most rewarding one.
Now, if someone can help me get these stabilisers off the back of this plane, I have a flight I want to make. SOLO.
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