August 14, 2009 in Agile, Agile 2009 by Mark Levison

Agile2009_WebBadges_Speaker[1] In the past year I’ve been doing alot of reading on neuroscience and improving my understanding of how the brain works. It started with Norman Doidge’s book: “The Brain That Changes Itself” which I read for fun on vacation last year. As a I read this book, I kept thinking that there has to be a way to apply a better understanding of the brain and neuroplasticity to our approaches to teaching and training. This lead me to read a large number of books: John Medina’s “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving”, James Zull’s “The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning”. Tangential I also tried: Torkel Klingberg’s “The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory” and Larry McCleary’s “The Brain Trust Program”. Finally I found a few interesting blogs: SharpBrains and Neurons Firing.

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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If you want to bring Mark into your organization for Training, Coaching or Consulting please visit the corporate site: The Agile Consortium.