In my fraternity, a great deal of effort is put into the training of brothers for officer positions within the house. This process often lasts the course of an entire semester and takes quite a bit of commitment from the outgoing officer and the assistant. Throughout the training process, a significant cognitive system is developed for the effective transfer of the knowledge and skills needed.
I had direct experience with this over the past semester as I was training a brother to take over as social chair. The necessity of a rather sophisticated cognitive system first becomes apparent when the outgoing social chair attempts to give the assistant a rundown of all his responsibilities.
To give the assistant a list of what needs to be done to have a successful event would be pointless, there is simply too much information that needs to be ingested. Rather, the training process is gradual and involves representations across multiple modalities and several transformations of representation state.
Toward the beginning of training, the outgoing officer typically would ask the assistant to handle a small subset of the overall task. For example, the assistant might help decide on the theme for the event. In deciding, the assistant would present ideas to the social chair and receive feedback. This process involves a distribution of the cognitive processes between the assistant and social chair, in that the ideas of assistant are processed by the social chair internally to help make a judgement whether the idea is a good one, given past experience and other additional insight.
At first these smaller subsets of the task are tightly coupled, since there is a very close dialogue back and forth within the group. Ideally, as the assistant has more experience and internalizes much of this, he can begin to handle much of the event coordination himself, with periodic checks with the social chair. This makes the task much more loosely coupled and also marks a changing in the representational state.
Another mode of representation used in the task comes from the records of the current social chair who would take notes of each event he was in charge of. The assistant uses these records as another representational state to gain insight into the best ways to handle events.
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I think this is a good example of a cognitive system. I have experience in this area and know what you are talking about because I was my fraternity's social chair as well. People do not realize the amount of work that actually goes into creating a good event and also in training the new social chairs for their job. It takes a lot of coordination to set the event, get everything ready, and actually executing a good party. It is sometimes even harder to try and train someone to do a good job.
ReplyDeleteI know very much so how much planning it can take to plan any event, especially it being one that the social chair is planning. The time that it can take is much more daunting than it seems at first. The system that you've described, Tom, is very much within line of a shadow that follows you around for the semester and slowly takes over what you're doing right now. In essence, the transition becomes much more seamless for both you and the new social chair.
ReplyDeleteI know a lot of the knowledge is passed down by experience, but I would be curious to know if there's any "guide" or "handbook" that you could write or pass out to aid in this process. It would be a different representation and could ease the transition even more. It could even make this whole process less of a repetitive thing and more organized.