How to Build Better Learning

Building learning isn’t easy. It’s a painful process to define expectations, settle the scope, and assemble content, any one of which can be a major stumbling block for stakeholders. With that much involved, companies want to build learning that can be quickly executed, revised, and evaluated. Building good learning that is targeted to an audience and provides information they can immediately use, can often be at odds with one or all of those three targets. 

The compromise is to put learners into classrooms, and deliver all the information, foie gras style, stuffing the information into the learners in the name of efficiency: This is the chalk-and-talk - Put some points onto a whiteboard, and talk about them at great length. 

Ever read Harry Potter? Look up Professor Binns’ Magical History. Probably the most genius metaphor for bad learning that I’ve encountered. 

So, how can we make it better?

Today, let’s talk a little about a concept you may not be aware of called Affective Shielding. This is a bedrock concept in the field of educational psychology, and it’s quite simple: Under stress, you can’t learn. 

I tutor students on an occasional basis. Math (though not my specialty), and English. What I notice regularly is that if learners don’t understand a particular step in the process, the rest of it is noise. In one case, I was working with a student to solve word problems in mathematics, a sore point for many learners. 

The stumbling block was how to extract information from the word puzzle: The learner knew the process to solve the mathematical problem, but pulling the data was the problem. In being constantly unable to solve the problem without outside guidance, my learner became increasingly frustrated, and with the frustration came cognitive overload, and a corresponding inability to get any new information in.

How can this be prevented in your learning initiatives?

The answer is to break down your content. That doesn’t mean creating acronyms and job aids for everything and anything, rather following these three pieces:

1) Simplify: Clarify your wording, and avoid excessive detail - Figure out what’s nice to have, and remove or simplify it so that it doesn’t distract learners. Avoid formal language where you can, because you want your learners’ brainpower to be dedicated to figuring out the process, not untangling the words. Instead of looking at the whole word problem, scan sentence-by-sentence for any numbers. Filter anything that’s not important. Write down what is, and why.  

2) Model the Process: Role-Playing. Scenarios. Group discussion and charting. Modelling the process from start to finish, no matter how you do it, is incredibly important. To make it easier, follow the Golden Path: In your process, choose a scenario where everything happens according to plan, and show your learners. But what about when things go wrong? That can come later - Right now, you just want them to know how things work. In an ideal process, create a simple word problem that has all the numbers clearly listed. Walk through how you find them with the learner, and explain the steps. 

3) Immediacy: Learning is useless if it’s forgotten. Break down the learning, show how it works, and allow learners to exercise the process immediately (And make sure to remind them of the process occasionally via e-mails or postings), and you will have learning that sticks!

Until next time, feel free to find me on LinkedIn (https://ca.linkedin.com/in/thelearningguru) or on Twitter @LnDGuru and let’s talk about what I can do for your organization’s learning needs!