I’m presenting at Agile Ottawa this month. The presentation is a reprise of my Agile 2009 session:

“Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain.”

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 into 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.

The top 5 reasons that traditional approaches to learning and mentoring fail are as follows:

• Lead with the abstract
• Not grounded in the listeners’ experience
• Passive students—i.e., those who just listen and take notes aren’t using all of their brain. They retain knowledge but don’t really understand it.
• Rewards don’t work
• High-fructose corn syrup

Benefits:

• Students and mentees will remember
• Learn how to correct mistakes
• Workshop attendees will stay awake

Time and Date: Tuesday, October 13. Pizza + Networking from 6:00 pm to 6:30 pm; Presentation from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm.

Location: the Code Factory (2nd Floor, 246 Queen Street); you need to buzz for the elevator.

Agile Ottawa is a group for anyone interested in Agile Software Development in the Ottawa region. The group organizes events the second Tuesday of every month at the Code Factory (2nd Floor, 246 Queen Street). Events usually begin at 6:30 pm.

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