A Thought on Senge's View of Disengagement

When in class the Professor asked us to consider our disengagement dilemma in Senge’s terms, a thought emerged: disengagement is the lack of personal mastery. In this case, I’m using “personal mastery” to mean the act of constantly striving towards bettering oneself, (the “journey”.) Senge portrays personal mastery in its corporate incarnation. He explains that personal mastery means digging deeper into one’s work, constantly striving to learn more and become more skillful. Such a description can be easily translated to the classroom: a student disengages when they apply just as much effort as is necessary, spending no time or effort in “digging”.

Personal mastery, Senge argues, doesn’t come easily. It takes patience, and clarity of vision. Most importantly, it seems to me, personal mastery comes from the understanding that one will never stop learning. There will never be a person who knows everything, and keeping an open mind to new ideas and changing circumstances is integral in pursuing personal mastery.

In her latest post, Alessandra mentions a stubborn ex-team member who she calls Kurt. Kurt is asked to think of ways that he can involve his community in achieving a visionary goal – in his case, eliminating disasters caused by engineering mistakes. He refused, however, to consider anything outside of his comfort zone, arguing that he could solve the problems by researching solo. It took the rest of the team members’ arguments to show Kurt that his stubbornness was counter-productive to his goal.

While the Kurt Situation might not immediately parallel the obstacles to personal mastery, I think his stubbornness illustrates a common human trait that keeps many from taking on “the journey”. Kurt, like many people, couldn’t see any problem with his solution: he could solve the problem fine by himself, he thought. He considered himself proficient enough to solve his goal without the immediate help of his peers.

This thought is counterproductive. With such a huge goal as solving engineering mistakes, there isn’t a person on Earth who is capable of solving it alone. Kurt is not seeking personal mastery as long as he is considering the fact that he always has room to learn, and other people will always have something to teach him.

Disengagement may involve a similar symptom. When I think back to the classes I was most disengaged in, I am reminded most of a Fusion Science course I took. This class, despite being completely within the topic boundary of my major and interest, was nearly impossible for me to become engaged in. I was the classic disengaged student: I put no more effort into the class than was necessary to get an A.

This disengagement wasn’t because the material was far above my head, and it wasn’t because the teacher was especially boring. I think I was uninterested mostly because I felt like I knew most of the course’s material already. Because my focus is Plasma and Fusion, I had taken courses before (and went on to take classes after) that repeated much of the same material. This course, however, offered the least amount of “new” information. I couldn’t help but zone out in class.

This disengagement, then, is my fault. I refused to pursue personal mastery in the course because, like Kurt, I felt like I had nothing to learn. Had I worked harder at finding new and interesting information from the subject matter, I may have eliminated my disengagement.

My point here is that, in an effort, to eliminate disengagement in a given course, the designer would be best of considering this human characteristic. With opportunities for a student who already knows much of the information to find something new and interesting, disengagement might become less of a problem.