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by Mark Levison.
Original Post: Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain
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From all this I started to realize that much of what we do to teach, coach and mentor in our profession is haphazard. The best teachers succeed in doing well, but often without knowing why it works. The rest of us struggle from session to the next wondering why people don’t understand and remember what we taught. In that spirit I decided to create a workshop/presentation with Linda Rising for Agile 2009, that aims to explain (and demonstrate) some of what works and what doesn’t.
As an added bonus we will get to talk about the food that the conference hotel supplies and what effect it will have on your ability to remember the session. Please come on join Wednesday August from 2:00-3:30pm in Columbus GH: “Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain”
Here is the agenda that you will find online:
Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.
Process/Mechanics
Agenda
Introduction
Top 5 Reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail:
Lead with the Abstract
Not Grounded in the Listeners experience
Passive students – i.e. Those just listening and taking notes, aren’t using all of the brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it. – Habituation
Rewards don’t work
Survey the audience for:
Background
Motivation
Prior Knowledge
The play: At the end of the session, tables (groups of 5-6 people) will be asked to present a short play (1-2 minutes) representing what they’ve learned. After each 10 minute lecture section we will ask the audience to prepare a little bit of the play. Along with sharing our experiences the goal is help attendees integrate what they’ve learned. Even if you’re not comfortable in helping to stage the play you can still gain the benefits by planning for it. With the help of the audience we will summarize the plays and include the insights gained in article that we will publish after the conference.
Introduction to Neuroscience
15 minutes – just a very brief summary of some basics - with the intent of building on what we discover the audience already knows
Kolb’s Learning Cycle
What are memories/things we learn?
Role of Hippocampus
Introduce an Idea & Explore with a Discussion and Play preparation 60 minutes (alternating 10 minutes of Lecture and 10 minutes of discussion/preparation) . The audience will choose 3 of the following 5 sections
David Ausubel. explains, “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach accordingly”
Mistakes/Misunderstandings are prior knowledge (i.e. neural networks), focus on the error and you might reinforce the incorrect network.
Appeal to the senses sight/sound, even use smells. Maybe we should open a bag of fresh roasted coffee beans at this point.
Role of Emotion - Fear is a great inhibitor of learning - who do we reduce fear?
Integration - until its fully integrated knowledge is just a series of facts that may or may not be useful to us. How do we help our students make the knowledge their own.
Wrapup
Reiterate key points
Top x further ideas (no supporting details)
References/Further reading
Retrospective 5 minutes
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