Creating a Magnetic and Engaging Environment for Learning

Teaching has changed little in over two thousand years. This paradigm has failed many students. I have personally met adults who have been to prep, primary and secondary school and are still not able to read and write at a basic level. Now as adults they are attending our Literacy and Numeracy workshops. One must ask the very obvious question: Didn't anybody notice that these people were not competent in these elementary skills? I'm committed and passionate about making it work- this time- for adult learners. After fifteen years of coaching and teaching and my own personal experience as someone who came to this country without being able to speak a word of English, I've picked up some great techniques! Would you like to know about them?

First of all, let me try and demystify some things for you. One of the major errors that I have heard in recent years is that "We need to understand the background and world view of each individual ESOL learner." This is so false that it's ridiculous. As a presenter or teacher you need to know your craft.

That is to impart information in a way that the person is able to internalise and apply the skills, knowledge and attitudes to their lives. You are not a sociologist or a psychologist. You are not there to rescue the learner from any traumas, past experiences or cultural limiting beliefs. You are there to engage and to make sure that the learner learns.

Call me naïve and weird, but I have a belief about teaching: "Teaching is when learning takes place." Now I know that for some of you that may be stating the obvious, but in today's "self-paced-all-care-and-no-responsibility" training environments this is quite innovative! Today, some teachers will dump the information, and then leave the learning to be done by the student or leave the room.

There are three points which I would like to leave with you today. You will remember them with the acrostic: EVA. Because learning is for eva!

Expectation, Validation and Application.

Expectation:

A double-blind experiment was conducted in California where the experimenters called together a randomly selected group of teachers and a randomly selected group of students. The teachers were told that they were the best teachers in the school and had been chosen for their skill and teaching ability. They were to be given the students with the highest IQs (the previously randomly selected group) to be their pupils. The teachers were honoured and felt that they could do a good job of teaching these intelligent students.

After a term of school, the teachers were called back to report on their progress. Most of them had glowing reports: "The students were hungry to learn" "They were so inquisitive and they really wanted to excel, so we gave them additional curricula to expand their voracious appetite for knowledge"

The experimenters dropped their first bombshell: "The students that you had, were picked out of a hat." "That cannot be," the teachers thought, and then concluded that because they were the best teachers in the school that this alone guaranteed that they got excellent results from otherwise average students.

That's when the second bombshell was dropped: "The students were also picked randomly!"We get what we expect. So if you expect people to succeed, if your presupposition or belief is that learners will learn and that whatever it takes, they will all be competent. Then you as a trainer will become flexible in your approach and your student will learn! Unfortunately some teachers only take the responsibility in leading the horse to water. The skillful teacher will make the horse thirsty!

Validation

For me there is what I call a "learning loop." The learning loop is like the communication loop in the sense that it's not sufficient to deliver the message, but also absolutely imperative that the message is received and understood the way that the sender intended it. The only way to make sure that it is understood is by the use of feedback mechanisms. This feedback is what we call "validation" in the field of training.

According to NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) there is no failure, only feedback. This means that if someone is not getting it, our goal as trainers is to lead/guide them by presenting the information in such as way as it can be understood, learnt and applied. Understanding is of the mind, learning is of the heart and application is of the body. We only learn information when we are able to live it out physiologically.

Traditionally, validating is done through direct assessment: tests, questionnaires, exams and oral questioning. I have found that the way we run our validation will affect the result we get. Some of these methods may lead people to a nervous, unresourceful state that we call: "terror zone." Terror zone is when we get the glazed look of a deer in front of the headlights. We want to place the participant in the most resourceful state possible; this will set them up for success. Intimidation, fear and nervousness are not useful feelings when learning new subject matter.

I use many ways of validating, but my favourite is the blue ball. (At this point I take out my blue stress ball and validate by throwing the ball to the participants and asking them: What did you learn today?) It's a fun way of learning, it gives me feedback as to the understanding of the participants, and at this point I can choose to present the information in a new way if they haven't quite grasped it.

So here is the radical idea: Validation is not only testing the students, but giving me feedback to tell me where I need to improve on my delivery! Validation closes the learning loop, which some teachers leave open.

Application

Knowledge should be applied; it shouldn't be just information or explanation. As I said earlier, teaching is when learning takes place. Let me add: "Real learning is when you apply the knowledge in a different context."

The flip side of that is the fact that we can only learn something by relating it to what we already know. Our mind contains little bits of information (the stuff we know) and each of these bits has a hook on the end (this is a metaphor.) We can only place new information where there is a hook. In that fashion, we link the known to the unknown in a perfect link.

Let me give you an example of this. A few years ago I was asked to go to a remote Aboriginal community in outback Australia to teach MYOB accounting. These people had received a Certificate from an unscrupulous training organisation that said that they had the skills, knowledge and attitude to be able to do computerised bookkeeping. However, the reality was that they didn't and I had the task of making the Certificate true, by imparting the training they didn't receive in the first place.

Unlike you and I, who grow up in an environment where parents, friends and peers discuss things such as balancing the budget, deposits, withdrawals, expenses, equity, assets and other financial terms; these people aren't privy to that kind of conversation. So I knew that I had to link this new information to something they could relate to.

Here they were living in Cape York Peninsula where rains come during the summer, and then it's dry for the rest of the year. I had my metaphor which I could "hang" new information to: A rainwater tank! I explained that in the wet season the tank would fill up, and then during the rest of the year they would have to ration the water so that it lasted. Everyone could relate to that. Well I explained, the water tank is your bank account, the rain is the funding you receive at the start of the financial year, and the tap on the end of the tank is the expenses you have. So now I could explain: Assets, Expenses, Budget, Allocation Accounts and a host of other terms, based on this one relevant metaphor.

Real knowledge then is knowledge which has been internalised. Students shouldn't be studying just for exams, but for life. When emphasis is taken off rote learning and placed on applied learning, then the knowledge sticks. That's when the training event goes from information to transformation!

So in summary, as a trainer you are the professional, you are the expert; therefore you need to drive the process so that real learning takes place. The way to do this is by remembering that training is for EVA!

Expectation- Your presupposition should be that there are no inflexible learners, only inflexible trainers. Expect success and your pupils will rise to the occasion. There was a movie a while back called "Dangerous Minds" with Michelle Pfeiffer. In that movie, based on a true story of a school in the Bronx district of New York, the students were given A's at the start of the term. They're job was to keep the "A." How many of you realise that we will place more effort in keeping something we have rather than getting something which we may never have? All the students had to do to keep their "A" was to produce "A" grade work for the rest of the year. This assumption of expectation is powerful indeed!

Validation - Check for understanding and do it regularly. In the average training day, you should be validating every single important piece of information. See if you can come up with creative ways of doing this without using the onerous sounding words: "tests" or "exams"

Application - Find out if they really internalised the information by asking questions such as: "How can you use this information that we have covered?" or "What else could you apply this principle to?"

Mario Cortés regularly travels around Australia from his base in Tasmania to speak on topics relating to leadership and innovation. Some of these include: key speaker at the HGLV (Hume Global Learning Village) Annual Conference on Creativity and Innovation. Also the Tasmanian State Conference on Adult Literacy where he presented an innovative approach based on Emotional Inte