Issue: My audience has a hard time remembering what I teach
Solution: Reflection, spaced repetition and brain helpers
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.
- Allow for practice and provide feedback as much as possible. Linked to the next one:
- 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).
- Add emotion through storytelling. Humans are wired for learning through stories (think of our cavepeople ancestors). Associations and emotions help with retention big time.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!