Jonena Relth, President and Leadership Evangelist, TBD Consulting
Learning professionals and corporate leaders, I think we can all learn from Diane Laufenberg, an excellent teacher. Diane's teaching methods immerse her students in experiential learning experiences. They learn in an environment that encourages creativity, critical thinking, processing and reflection. And one very important element of the learning is that the students are given the freedom to fail and then learn from their mistakes. This is smart teaching because we learn more when we fail, receive immediate feedback and are given the opportunity to try again the right way.
There is a lot of current data now that shows how the human brain works -- how it retains and then retrieves information. When we learn, pathways in the brain are formed and then reinforced with retrieval practice. Basically, when we learn something, our brain connects two or more concepts in memory, which psychologists call encoding. It is important that we make this pathway to information easily accessible.
Accessibility depends on some things that we should consider when we develop our training, including:
- How recently the learned information was thought about
- How often the information is thought about
- The level of emotional importance
- The similarity between the learning and retrieval contexts.
Trainers can't always take their trainees on a field trip, but we can walk them through the call center where they will be working after new-hire training. The participants will see the call volume and wait times projected on message boards, do buddy-jacking with agents wearing headsets talking with customers, and experience the environment's lights, sounds and culture. By experiencing this simple "field trip," the participants' brains will build pathways for their new information that has an emotional component and a similarity between the learning and retrieval contexts -- thus moving the information to long-term memory.
It's good business to teach our employees in ways that their new information is stored in their long-term memories so that they can excel at their jobs. According to the 2011 Training Magazine's Industry Report, US corporations invested $59.7 Billion on training. We should be using teaching and/or training methods that ensure that we are spending that money wisely!
Jonena
TBD Consulting has a 21-year, proven track record for ensuring employee performance improvement which translates to employee performance success. Whether you need help developing an in-house training organization, create a Lean Academy, or simply need "extra hands" to meet your deadlines or ROI goals, please contact Jonena. She and her qualified staff are here to assist you with your organizational development, coaching and training initiatives.
Corporate Office 602-263-1961. Email Jonena today!
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