Learners hate to be bored. Their brains snooze when they don’t see or hear meaningful and motivational mental connections to their world.
An often told story of President Eisenhower is worth sharing: Ike was President of Columbia University after the War and before he became President of the United States. There was a particular courtyard on campus that was always being crossed by students, to the point that the grass was worn and people began to complain. Students were taking the shortest distance between two buildings for their courses.
The alternatives available to Ike were many: build fences to direct foot traffic, plant thorny hedges, change the classroom schedules, issue warnings and consequences for walking on the grass, ignore the issues, or pave the path. He had the path paved. Some urban planners and architects wait until the travel paths (patterns) develop, and then they build the sidewalks.
Learners already have many worn paths through their mental neural networks. Their eyes light up when they can see and sense how everything ties together into a knowable pattern. Every time your learners begin a training program they are initiating a journey down known neural pathways or starting new neural pathways. How well are your training programs paving those neural pathways?
Learning Happens When There Is ATTENTION
Let’s begin with what goes on in a person’s head when they’re learning. First, learning requires attention. Effective training grabs the learners’ attention and holds it.
Unfortunately, The neural systems in the brain that control attention and store information as memory get tired very quickly (in minutes). They need to rest every three to five minutes, or else they become much less responsive. They recover pretty quickly, but training designers have to work with this quick fatigue/boredom pattern for their learners to learn efficiently.
What grabs learners’ attention? Fascinating or dramatic statistics, relevant stories, mind-catching analogies and emotion-packed examples perk up the learners’ brains.
Learning Happens When There Is MEANING
Learners learn faster and easier when the content has meaning in their world. John Loudon McAdam, a Scottish engineer living in England in the early 1800s, noticed the difficulty people had trying to move goods and supplies over hole filled, often muddy, frequently impassable dirt roads. He got the great idea of raising the level of the road using layers of rock and gravel. This immediately made the roads more stable, less muddy and less flood-prone.
As county after county adopted his process, now called macadamization, an astonishing after-effect occurred. People instantly got more dependable access to one another’s goods and services. Trade grew. People got richer. By changing the way things
moved, McAdam changed the way we lived.
What does this have to do with learning? McAdam’s central notion wasn’t to improve goods and services, but to improve access to goods and services. Your training designers can do the same for their learners’ brains by improving the way they present information. It needs to be meaningful.
Meaning starts with doing a really good job of explaining key concepts or new terminology to drive understanding. If learners don’t know what a term or word means their path to figuring out the underlying layers and levels of information is hindered resulting in a very bumpy, uneven and difficult brain path.
Another way training designers can smooth the information uptake process is to present content that is organized in meaningful chunks to make it more accessible to the learners’ brains. Following the ‘Never Over Seven’ rule ensures that any content list over seven items is grouped or clustered for easier brain loading.
Learning Happens When There is MOTIVATION
Being motivated to learn is half the battle. When your learners know that the training is going to have some personal WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) elements they are more interested and curious about what’s going to be experienced.
PULLING learning motivation from an already primed learner is 100% more effective than PUSHING learning motivation at the learner. Learning is something learners do for themselves.
Learning Happens When There Are MENTAL
CONNECTIONS
As soon as learning content is presented to the learners, they are mentally scanning their memory banks to see if it sounds or looks familiar. They are asking themselves, ‘What’s this similar to?’ How does this connect to what I already know or can do?
The starting point for learning occurs when the learner’s existing knowledge is activated through the process of connecting to and feeding information into their brains.
Imagine that there are brain hooks, clips, or hangers waiting to be used in each learner’s brain. Tossing the information in and hoping for the best just won’t work. Just like a carnival game, training designers need to target what they present to the learners’ needs so that when the connection is made, they win the big stuffed animal (metaphorically that is).
Learning Happens When There is MEMORABLE
CONTENT
Sometimes what is being presented needs to be bizarre or unusual
for learners to actively listen and remember. Have you noticed that you can remember painful experiences with more clarity than everyday activities? Emotions, including laughter, help make ideas more memorable.
Also, varying the type of content and how it’s presented makes it more memorable. For example, using visual images, sounds and words in various combinations help build memory traces in the brain.
Learning Happens When There is ACTION
Learning means action. Think of this as the ‘Go’ stage of ‘Get Ready, Get Set, and Go’. The race is on. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, states that it takes 10,000 hours to be a world-class expert in virtually anything.
So practice literally builds the neural networks of expertise. Genetics may allow one person to build synapses faster than another, but either
way the lesson must still be learned. Genius must be built
Learners need to interact with the information in a variety of dynamic ways as well as discuss it with others or repeat it in their heads (verbal self-talk) to aid recall. Using creative interactions such as games and quizzes also build better retention.
Learning Happens When There is REPETITION
Learners need to repeat what they’ve seen, heard, said, and/or felt more than once. Young children repeat activities over and over again. As adults we think that somehow once is enough. It’s not.
Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York, who won a Nobel
prize in 2000 for discovering much of the neural basis of memory and learning, has shown that both the number and strength of the nerve connections associated with a memory or skill increase in proportion to how often and how emphatically
the learning content is repeated.
Recall becomes effortless and eventually automatic when learners repeat what they’ve learned until they know that they know that they know (and can do)
Paving Neural Pathways – Your Own and
Others
Now that you know these learning principles you can consider how well your training initiatives pave your learners’ neural pathways to achieve learning impact. You can also improve your own learning efficiency and effectiveness. Learning happens when there is attention, meaning, motivation, mental connections, memorable content, action, and repetition. Brain hooks anyone?
