A study in the journal Neuron indicates that eye movements reveal unconscious memories, which the conscious mind cannot quite recollect. Researchers tracked eye movements and saw that their subjects’ gazes dwelled on the right answer even when they got the memory test wrong. Learn more.
Learning hasn’t always been my strength, so it’s ironic that I am the co-owner of an employee development and training company. When I was a kid in school I used to dread having to memorize dates in history, vocabulary lists and multiplication tables. My Mum has a great technique always seemed to work and now through rose colored glasses I see the wisdom of her ways.
“READ IT, WRITE IT, SAY IT.” – I can still hear her drumming that into me! When I wasn’t too lazy to try I would apply her technique almost always with great results. Of course what she was doing was engaging me cognitively (read it, say it) and physically (write it).
Now, take that same technique a step further and incorporate emotional engagement. I could have created a story using the vocabulary words, or created a mental picture or just had a dialogue about the content with my Mum, a friend or someone with whom I felt an emotional connection.
At IdeaLearning Group we take the Read it, Write it, Say it concept and create physically, emotionally and cognitively engaging employee learning experiences.
Looks like my Mum was onto something!
Everything I needed to know about learning, I learned in kindergarten.
My twin boys are in kindergarten this year –a big milestone for the whole family. As a student of learning, it has been interesting for me to observe the similarities in elementary and adult learning methods.
I have been impressed with the integration of curriculum across all experiences. For example in October, in keeping with a Halloween theme, their teachers introduced curriculum around skeletons. The kids learned about foods to keep their bones strong by eating yogurt, cheese and other high calcium snacks and they cut out pictures of individual bones and glued them together to create skeletons. Great stuff, but I was amazed to find out that in music class (yes… in a public school!) they were singing “the leg bone’s connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone…” remember that one? That week the librarian read them a story about skeletons and in gym class they were reminded that exercise strengthens their bones. By the end of the week they knew an awful lot about the insides of their bodies and were gleefully telling me all about it. They had participated in brain based learning and made their mom proud.
Currently we are designing a leadership development training program – it’s a big client and a big job. One of the things they asked us early on was why we couldn’t just use or slightly tweak a program that we’d already built for another client. Despite the obvious ethical implications, at ILG we know that building custom programs is the only real way to achieve sustainable results. We’ve designed lots of leadership training programs for large and small organizations and we have a lot of resources that we can pull from. The thing is though, that as is always the case, the Needs Analysis showed us that the culture and performance gaps dictated an entirely different curriculum and design.
Shannon likes to remind me that I once said “we build custom learning lattes”, and it is kind of like that. Each client has different tastes (culture) and different needs (performance gaps) and a regular old cup o’ joe just isn’t going to work for everyone.
