Teachers and those involved in education will get the chance to discuss whether techniques used by professional sport, for instance, have any place in the classroom.
The University of Bristol is to host a major conference next week [Thursday 20 – Saturday 22 April] on the different methods available to teach people new skills outside the traditional classroom environment.
The event will feature leading figures from a variety of walks of life talking about their own learning experiences and how it differs from being at school or college.
The scientist Lord Robert Winston will be among those taking part along with Gloucestershire and ex-England cricketer Mark Alleyne, the former education minister Estelle Morris and up-and-coming Bristol youth band The Naturals.
Academics from Stanford and Harvard universities in the United States will also be speaking at the conference - entitled This Learning Life.
The three-day event has been organised by the Graduate School of Education at Bristol University and the Institute for Advanced Studies.
Professor Guy Claxton, from the Graduate School, said: “The conference is for everyone who wishes education to provide all young people with a more powerful preparation for life in the 21st century.
“Formal education relies on a very narrow view of learning – batches of same-age students sit in specially built classrooms, studying pre-determined, bite-sized curricula under the supervision of the specially trained adults, subjected to periodic grading and selection.
“Yet, elsewhere in the world, and sometimes, just down the road, many quite different ways of doing and construing learning are alive and well.
“The football coach, the video game designer, the counsellor or the chef all work with a rich diversity of views of learning and teaching.
“They draw on very different models of the mind, how it changes and how it can be helped to change, which result in very different kinds of practice.
“If education is a preparation for lifelong learning, can we align the learning models of schools and colleges more closely with those of the real world.”
The conference will also feature Tom Bentley - director of the influential think-tank Demos – the British chess champion Jonathan Rowson and Kathy Sykes – Professor for Public Engagement in Science at the University of Bristol.