Have you heard of the Winter Blues? Do you sometimes get it? Growing up in Mexico I had never heard of it. Then I came to Canada, where the winters are cold, dark and long, and I am now well acquainted with them. (I know Californians have “the January hill” which is the weight of all the bills from the December festivities).

I have found ice skating as a very good antidote for winter blues, which is at its peak these days in our household. Here is a picture of my kid and I at the local rink:

Myself I learned as a clumsy 30-year old falling over and over the frozen Ottawa Canal. Thankfully I had a sweet -Canadian- boyfriend back in those days to hold my hand and pull me back up every time I fell. With his help and guidance I did learn.

So I was watching my kid this past weekend how he fell, and stands up and tries again. Gets a bit further. Fell again. Stands up again, keeps going. Fell… But he is a lot better than last year when he couldn’t stand on his skates more than a minute before falling. Why? because every weekend we are out there on the ice, falling and trying again.

(unless it is one of those -40 C weeks, then we hibernate)

I’m writing this because you guys wanted me to expand more on this very topic of learning from failure from the last blog post.

A few ideas on how to include “regulated failure” in training activities without traumatizing anybody include:

• Questions: Make it safe to be wrong or half-correct. ALWAYS provide the correct answer.
• Coaching: Let them try, do it wrong or fail, and then point out the correct way of doing it.
• Scenarios: Bring out the storyteller in you: this happens… what would you do? and then always debrief what would be your take on it.
• Examples: Similar to scenarios but something already happened, so it is more of analyzing what was the outcome and how could it change.
• Simulations & role playing: combines all the above with a touch of fun and next level engagement.
• Knowledge checks, quizzes or exams: They are really questions but more formal. In order for learning to happen from them, the correct or expected answer has to always be provided after they try.
• Videos, documents produced by others: Learning from others’ mistakes also helps and takes the pressure off a bit. Add a bit of emotion with something in the line of: “imagine it was you”.
• Lessons learned sessions: If you have watched ER, Grays Anatomy or any medical TV show you have seen the townhalls where doctors talk about medical mistakes and how to prevent them from happening in the future. Team meetings and [virtual or live] classroom settings are the perfect venue for these conversations too. There needs to be a certain level and culture of comfort though, for people to be willing to talk about their mistakes or lessons learned in the spirit of collective learning.

The KEY in learning from failure or mistakes, is to always know what is the correct answer or path of action. (If not, one makes the mistake and doesn’t necessarily know it was a mistake. Or you know it was a wrong answer but you don’t know what is the correct one).

Take Action:

Plan opportunities for your audience to make mistakes and learn from them in a safe and controlled environment. Make sure you ALWAYS include debriefs or the correct paths/answers after these activities.

Wishing you a mild Winter blues / January hill season friends! As for us, we will be at the mountain lakes skating.

The post Help your audience to learn from failure appeared first on Prisma Learning.

Here’s an analogy I love from Julie Dirksen (Design for how people learn, 2016):

• A new learning is like a piece of clothing that you try on (you learn, sensory memory).
• Then you leave it on the chair by your bed – quick to retrieve though it might end up buried underneath other pieces of clothing… or a cat (short term memory).
• Eventually you move it to your closet, where it is folded and placed where it belongs: pants with pants, shirts with shirts, sweaters with sweaters; ready for when you need to use it, you know where to find it (long term memory).

Long term memory is where the learning happens. Encoding (folding) what is in our short term memory (chair) into our long term memory (closet) is the art of good learning design.

How can we help our learners transfer what they learned from the short term memory to the long term memory?

• Give your audience a chance to reflect. Ask questions like: “how are you going to use this new learning?”, “what are the advantages of using [or not] this?”, “how does this relate to anything I already knew?” and then allow for a few moments of silence for that reflection to happen. Guided reflection is like ruminating the new content and the best antidote for overwhelm.
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• Allow for practice and provide feedback as much as possible. Linked to the next one:
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• Plan opportunities for failing. Learning from failure is more effective than learning from success. Don’t give your audience all the answers, allow them to discover or guess important information. Debrief always after. And allow them time to reflect on the experience (back to point one).
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• Add emotion through storytelling. Humans are wired for learning through stories (think of our cavepeople ancestors). Associations and emotions help with retention big time.
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• Provide activities for the audience to “play” with the new content: teach it to others, research it, present it, analyze it, evaluate it, illustrate it visually, summarize it in a flipchart, make a song out of it… the more angles to interact with the content, the more it will stick.
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• Chunk down content. Easier to fold one piece of clothing at the time than a pile. Break down your content so it will be easier to digest it for your audience.
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• Time-spaced reviews. This is a big one and it has its own post that you can access here.

Take Action

These six points are already a lot, so I will leave you to try one by one to your comfort. Is there a favourite one that you already use? Would you like more details on any of them? Happy to elaborate on any, just send me a DM in LinkedIn or Instagram or an email and we’ll connect! We love talking shop and getting to know our community better!

The post How to help your audience remember what you teach them appeared first on Prisma Learning.

A person learns something and remembers 100% after your session, yeyy!
By day 1 they only remember 60%
By day 4 they might remember 20%
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The solution: time-spaced reminders. Preferably short and sweet. The ideas is that key training takeaways keep coming back to the learners after the session is finished (in different modalities ideally) and help them stay fresh and move from the short to the long-term memory.

Microlearning tools are your best friends here. They are learning activities that provide a short engagement intentionally designed to help the brain review, retain and transfer information from the short-term brain to the long-term brain.

Examples of microlearning tools and activities include:

• visuals (infographics, graphs, charts)
• job aids
• a quick discussion in a team meeting
• a strategically-placed question
• video or audio (short and to the point)
• reading a blog post (or even better: writing it)
• quizzes
• case studies or scenarios

The point is that they have to be intentional and built into your learning design.

❓ QUESTIONS ABOUT MICROLEARNING

Q. How long should a microlearning activity be?​
A. Billboards convey a message in 5 seconds. A team discussion can take 10 minutes. A video clip can be anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes long. Plus Lola will take much less time to make sense of an infographic than Katia just because she is a visual-type of person and maybe more experienced. The microlearning activity has to be the right amount of time to cover the objective while fitting in the right amount of time that the participant has.

Q. What is a common mistake when creating micro-learning tools?​
A. To focus too much in the content and little in the context. For an employee that is on the road constantly, anything that is papers or hard copy will be more of an annoyance than help. They need digitally accessible materials. For an audience whose second language is English, more visuals and less written / spoken words might work best. Go back to considering who is your audience and what is what they need and want.

Q. Are there more resources about microlearning?​
A. Plenty of them. One of my favourites is this podcast episode by Endurance Learning:
​https://trainlikeachampion.blog/microlearning-basics/​

Take Action:

Use microlearning in your training strategy as part of your Learning Guru toolkit and help your audiences retain your teachings in their long-term memory! Use your Guide with 31 learning activities that aren’t Slides for inspiration.

The post Support your learners’ retention through spaced repetition appeared first on Prisma Learning.