Creating a magnetic and attractive environment for learning

Teaching has changed little in more than two thousand years. This paradigm has failed many students. I have personally met adults who have gone to high school, elementary, and middle school and still cannot read or write at a basic level. Now, as adults, they are attending our literacy and numeracy workshops. One must ask the very obvious question: Did no one realize that these people were not proficient in these elemental abilities? I am committed and passionate about making it work, this time, for adult learners. After fifteen years of training and teaching and my own personal experience as someone who came to this country without being able to speak a word of English, I have learned some great techniques! Would you like to meet them?

First of all, let me try to demystify a few things for you. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve heard in recent years is that “We need to understand the background and worldview of every ESOL student.” This is so untrue that it is ridiculous. As a presenter or teacher, you need to know your craft.

It is about imparting information in such a way that the person is able to internalize and apply the skills, knowledge and attitudes to their life. You are not a sociologist or a psychologist. You are not there to rescue the student from any trauma, past experience, or cultural limiting beliefs. You are there to participate and make sure the student learns.

Call me naive and weird, but I have a belief about teaching: “Teaching is when you learn.” Now I know that for some of you that may be a no-brainer, but in today’s “self-paced, all-care-no-responsibility” training environments this is pretty groundbreaking! Today, some teachers will dump the information and then leave the learning to the student or walk out of the classroom.

There are three points that I would like to leave you with 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 brought together a group of randomly selected teachers and a group of randomly selected students. The teachers were told that they were the best teachers in the school and that they had been chosen for their skill and teaching ability. The students with the highest IQ (the previously randomly selected group) were to be given to be his pupils. The teachers were honored and felt they could do a good job teaching these smart students.

After a school term, teachers were called in to report their progress. Most of them had glowing reports: “The students were hungry to learn” “They were so curious and really wanted to excel, so we gave them additional curricula to expand their voracious appetite for knowledge”

The experimenters dropped their first bomb: “The students you had were chosen from a hat.” “That can’t be,” the teachers thought, and then concluded that because they were the best teachers in the school, this only guaranteed that they were getting excellent results from average students.

It was then that the second bomb was dropped: “The students were also chosen at random!” We get what we expect. So if you expect people to be successful, if your presupposition or belief is that students will learn and that, whatever it takes, everyone will be competent. Then you, as a coach, will become flexible in your approach and your student will learn! Unfortunately, some teachers only take responsibility for leading the horse into the water. The skillful master will make the horse thirsty!

Validation

For me there is what I call a “learning cycle.” The learning cycle is like the communication cycle in that it is not sufficient to deliver the message, but it is also absolutely imperative that the message is received and understood in the way the sender intended. The only way to ensure that it is understood is through the use of feedback mechanisms. This feedback is what we call “validation” in the training field.

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

Traditionally, validation is done by direct assessment: tests, questionnaires, exams and oral questioning. I found out that the way we run our validation will affect the result we get. Some of these methods can put people into a nervous and resourceless state that we call a “terror zone.” The terror zone is when we have the glazed gaze of a deer in front of the headlights. We want to put the participant in the most ingenious state possible; This will set them up for success. Bullying, fear, and nervousness are not useful feelings when learning a new subject.

I use many ways to validate, but my favorite is the blue ball. (At this point I take out my blue stress ball and validate it by throwing the ball to the participants and asking them: What did you learn today?) It is a fun way to learn, it gives me feedback regarding the understanding of the participants, and at this point I can choose to present the information in a new way if they have not fully understood it.

So here’s the radical idea: validation is not just evaluating students, but also giving me feedback to tell me where I need to improve in my delivery. Validation closes the learning cycle, which some teachers leave open.

Request

Knowledge must be applied; It should not be just information or explanation. As I said before, teaching is when learning takes place. Let me add: “Real learning is when knowledge is applied in a different context.”

The other side of the coin is the fact that we can only learn something by relating it to what we already know. Our mind contains small pieces of information (what we know) and each of these pieces has a hook at the end (this is a metaphor). We can only place new information where there is a hook. In that way, we link the known with 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 the Australian outback to teach MYOB accounting. These individuals had received a Certificate from an unscrupulous training organization that said they had the skills, knowledge, and attitude to be able to keep computerized accounts. However, the reality was that they didn’t and I was tasked with making the Certificate true by delivering the training they didn’t receive in the first place.

Unlike you and I, we grow up in an environment where parents, friends, and colleagues discuss things like balancing the budget, deposits, withdrawals, expenses, capital, assets, and other financial terms; these people are unaware of that kind of conversation. I knew then that I had to link this new information to something they could relate to.

Here they lived on the Cape York peninsula, where the rains come during the summer and then it is dry the rest of the year. I had my metaphor where I could “hang” new information: A rainwater tank! I explained that in the rainy season the tank was filled, and then during the rest of the year they would have to ration the water to make it last. Everyone could relate to that. Well, I already explained to you, the water tank is your bank account, the rain is the financing you receive at the beginning of the fiscal year, and the tap at the end of the tank is the expenses you have. So now could you explain: Assets, Expenses, Budget, Allocation Accounts and a host of other terms, based on this relevant metaphor.

Real knowledge, then, is knowledge that has been internalized. Students should not study just for exams, but for life. When the emphasis is removed from rote learning and placed on applied learning, knowledge is maintained. That’s when the training event goes from information to transformation!

So, in short, as a coach, you are the professional, you are the expert; therefore, you must drive the process for real learning to occur. The way to do it is by remembering that the training is for EVA!

Expectation: Your budget should be that there are no inflexible learners, just inflexible coaches. Expect success and your students will rise to the occasion. There was a movie a while ago called “Dangerous Minds” with Michelle Pfeiffer. In that movie, based on a true story of a school in the Bronx borough of New York, students were given A at the beginning of the quarter. His job was to keep the “A”. How many of you realize that we will put more effort into keeping something we have rather than getting something we may never have? All the students had to do to maintain their “A” was produce an “A” job for the remainder of the year. This expectation assumption is really powerful!

Validation – Check for understanding and do it regularly. On an average training day, you must validate every important piece of information. See if you can find creative ways to do this without using the burdensome sounding words: “tests” or “exams.”

Request: Find out if they really internalized the information by asking questions like, “How can you use this information that we have covered?” or “What else could this principle apply to?”