I am curious why you deleted the section in Four stages of competence on a fifth stage: you did not give an edit summary. I appreciate, from your username and edit history, thtat you may be related to Gordon Training International. It does not appear in GTI documents, but this fifth stage appears in many documents discussing the theory, and was referenced. Indeed, an academic paper references Wikipedia for this idea. I do not know why it lacks encyclopaedic value; it certainly informs much thinking on the topic. I am interested to hear your thoughts. Many thanks, --Alasdair Forrest (talk) 19:13, 24 May 2011 (UTC)
- Thank you for your continued activity to improve Four stages of competence. You added an interesting sentence on what Noel Burch called the stages initially. I don't doubt that it is true, since I think that you are in some way linked to Gordon Training International. But the edit was not supported by the citation, and appears nowhere online. Wikipedia cannot have unreferenced passages, so I have removed it for now. Is there a reference to it in print, perhaps? --Alasdair Forrest (talk) 12:10, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
- Thank you for your interest in trying to make sure the information on the Four Stages of Learning is as accurate as possible.
Yes, we are Gordon Training International, whose employee, Noel Burch, was the originator of the four stages. The edits to the Wikipedia entry were made by Linda Adams, President and CEO of GTI (Dr. Gordon is her late husband). In 2002, she asked Noel Burch (also now deceased) how he came up with the four stages. In an email dated May 8, 2002, Noel described in detail how he came up with and refined the Four Stages of Learning. Linda referred to Noel's email in adding the details to the Wikipedia entry recently. Here is the quote from his email: "Dear Linda: I came up with the stages at a gathering of (Effectiveness Training) Instructors in San Clemente. Originally, I had different names for the four steps--names that described my feelings as I learned the skills--names like ignorant, phony, mechanical, etc. The current learning stages were an outcome of work I did in the process of designing a new TET (Teacher Effectiveness Training workbook way back in the 1970's."
We will edit the Wikipedia entry and cite this source.
Also, it is interesting that Maslow's name has come to have a possible association with the four stages even though there is no mention of them in any of his work. [User: Gti123] 1:01, 27 June 2011