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How To Keep Your Audience Awake

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12 Most Engaging Presenter Behaviors…0n How to Keep Your Audience Awake

Do you want to engage your audience. First, many people in your audience are tired—probably at least a third of them just don’t get enough sleep. They’re sitting there hoping they won’t embarrass themselves by nodding off. Part of your job is to help them stay awake, to actually pay attention and consider what you are saying. Next time you practice a presentation, note how many of the following strategies you actually use. Then add a couple more. You don’t want your audience to look like this.

 

  1. Start by telling your audience what they will take away from your talk. What are three things worth paying attention to and remembering? One of my talks starts with: “When you leave after two hour workshop, you will know how to (1) organize a talk and save hours of time; (2) use my professionally designed slides to categorize information on your slides and keep your audience engaged; and (3) feel more confident and excited about giving a presentation.
  2. Speak less than the time allotted. When you begin, say, “I know I have 30 minutes. I will only talk for 15, and then let’s discuss what I’ve said.” Your audience will think to themselves, “OK, I can listen for 15 minutes.” Plus, they will be happy not to have to listen as long as they expected.
  3. Use silence effectively. When you are playing catch and you throw the ball to someone, you find yourself waiting—will the other player catch it, and how? You don’t throw ball after ball without looking to see if the person caught one of them. When you make a statement, it’s like playing ball—you have to wait in silence to see how people receive it. Don’t keep throwing more and more words without giving your audience the chance to catch each sentence.
  4. Pause periodically. Silence not only gives your audience a chance to digest your information—it also gives them permission to participate. When you pause, you non-verbally tell your audience that they can interrupt you. Your pause makes people feel comfortable—that you are encouraging them to jump in and speak. If you talk nonstop, you will never engage your audience.
  5. Emphasize key words. If you speak in the same voice tone throughout the entire presentation, no one knows what is really important. Make it obvious to your audience what they really need to pay attention to.
  6. Use numbers, and emphasize them. A person can pay attention better when you say, “There are three strategies to solve this situation. Number 1 is… Number 2 is… Number 3 is…” Every time you say a number, it reengages your audience’s attention and helps their brains to listen.
  7. Remind your audience of the benefits of what you just told them. I frequently say something like, “By using these professionally designed slides you will feel more confident when speaking, and you’ll be able to make eye contact with your audience because you won’t be reading the slides.”
  8. Add some emotion or humor to your talk. People can only sit and listen to someone spouting facts at them for so long. You have to engage the “child” part of your audience by using emotional words. “I’m excited today to be here to tell you some good news.” Or “The TEAM did some hard grueling work and came up with this amazing new way to visualize the product.”
  9. Tell a story that interests your audience. We all love stories—especially ones that have some emotion connected to them. Tell a story within 5 to 8 minutes of starting your talk.
  10. Say these words: “You, Your”. When starting say, “I am delighted to see all of you here.” Later on say, “As you know, we have this situation. First, you will hear some ideas and then please give your opinions about how we can change this situation.”
  11. Do something unexpected. One of my clients stopped talking in the middle of his presentation, blanked out the screen and said, “OK, you’ve heard enough of the possibilities of using this new program, let’s discuss your views so far.” The energy changed in the room. People started talking and came to some understandings before he went on. Another presenter passed out several products and asked people to talk about them.
  12. Give people “brain food”. Literally, give them food, and I don’t mean donuts. Here are some ideas: almonds, walnuts, cashews, small cups of bananas and blueberries, dark chocolate, small turkey sandwiches, yogurt (without the sugar), green tea. These foods will help them concentrate, which means they will be more engaged with you.

One last word:

If you yourself aren’t engaged, then you might as well forget it. Find some way to motivate yourself to be excited about your talk—you can’t expect your audience to carry you or motivate you. You are the one in front of the group, so it’s up to you to bring the interest and curiosity into the room. You don’t have to be an over-the-top enthused presenter. By using these strategies, you can exude quiet engagement.
Which ones will you start with?

PS: You may think you do these things already, but until you record yourself and watch, or ask someone else to critique you, you may just be fooling yourself.

How To Generate Good Ideas

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Stop Generating Useless Ideas, an article by: Gijs van Wulfen

Generating ideas is wonderful. You remember those great EUREKA moments under the shower, while driving or just talking to others.

Unfortunately, the hangover comes always later when you present your ideas to others. They are often less enthusiast than you and raise a lot of ‘BUT’…… questions. Or everybody says it’s a great idea, and nothing happens after all. All of this is so frustrating. I haven been there, seen it , done it and got fed up with it.

Now why are most of the ideas turned down? You could point out that your colleagues, bosses or potential partners are so conservative. And although you might be right, you just don’t get your ideas accepted, if they think they are useless.

Coming up with a lot of ideas might make you a creative person but to be an effective innovator ideas need to get implemented.

After I overcame my frustrations (at later age) I got the feedback and insight that my ideas were useless to my bosses and managers because they were not relevant and didn’t fit their expectations. Sometimes my ideas were way too revolutionary, way too complex or just too big to handle.

How To Generate Good Ideas?

To be effective you have to bring to the table ideas which solve a problem or fulfill a dream in a new simple way and fit (or exceed) the expectations of your management, partners, or investors, otherwise nothing happens.

An essential question is: what do the decision-makers expect?

Most of the times the answer is that they don’t know. So, why don’t you take the initiative to make the expectations of your management explicit before you start generating ideas. This will make you a more effective innovator, because when you know their struggles you can provide them with new relevant solutions.

You even could start to formulate a clear a concrete idea-assignment which forces your management, from the start, to be concrete on the criteria your ideas must meet. You can formulate an idea-assignment with the help of the following six questions:

  1. Why do we need new ideas? (What’s the issue or challenge);
  2. Who will use the ideas? (Internal - external. Who is the target group);
  3. Where will the idea be used? (Which regions, countries, continents);
  4. What are we looking for? (Something evolutionary or revolutionary? Ideas for products, services, processes, business models?);
  5. When do we like to implement it? (Which year do we need this? 2014, 2015, 2016);
  6. Which criteria should new ideas meet? (Extra turnover; less costs; margin %; fits the strategy; investment budget,…..).

The best way to stop generating useless ideas is by ideating new simple solutions, which fit or exceed the expectations of the decision makers. So make their expectations and criteria explicit before you start. This will prevent a lot of personal frustration.

Ps. you can download a pdf with the 6W’s to make an idea-assignment here.

Wishing you lots of success generating more effective ideas!

Read also my own favorite post: 10 Insights to be an Effective Innovator

To read more from Gijs on LinkedIn, please click the FOLLOW button above or below.

Gijs van Wulfen recently published the bestseller : “The Innovation Expedition”. Order it at Amazon.com orAmazon.co.uk.

Picture: photosteve101 on Flickr, under creative commons. Thanks, Steve!

Featured on: Big Ideas & Innovation

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Real learning

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We are constantly learning, regardless of how old we are. Or, let’s at least say we are trying hard to learn. The ways we are learning, though, seem not quite right when we consider what we are trying to achieve.

If you can’t apply it, you haven’t learned

In most cases, you are interested in using the new knowledge to accomplish something. Yet, you choose to learn in ways that don’t bring you anywhere close to applying what you learn. Maybe it is trigonometry for the SATs, or web design for the job interview on the horizon. Even the book you are reading on how humans form habits is probably tied to a change you wish to make happen in your life. So, you do learn for a reason: You are hoping to apply what you learn. And you want that to happen sooner than later.

Doing the wrong things more doesn’t make things right

Given this very clear goal, what do we do? We listen, watch videos, take notes, read… When we realize that we retained very little, we find out we haven’t learned; we have already forgotten most of it. Then we try harder. Read harder, listen harder, write harder. You know it.

Try testing

What we don’t include in our learning effort is testing. That’s the secret missing piece in the routines of billions of people as they strive to learn. At worst, the act of testing yourself to see if you learned is completely absent. At best, it is an afterthought; a 10-question quiz at the end of a 4-week long study plan. Think about it. When was the last time you tested yourself on what you learned?

The disconnect between what we respect and what we do

This is completely against what we know and value in life about practice and experience. We have utmost respect for people who practice a lot; if they have been tested extensively and repeatedly, they must be great at what they do. We prefer lawyers with a strong track record in court. We feel more confident with surgeons who have more experience operating on others. Professional athletes dry-run over, and over, and over long before they get their first glimpse of the competition. Countless more examples underline one fact: We believe extensive testing is the right way for others, and we respect the ones who do more. But when it comes to us, we stay in our comfort zones, never looking back to evaluate whether we actually learned.

This comfort zone of ours makes us give in to the false sense of completion when we finish a book. It makes us move to the next blog post as soon as we are done with one. It justifies the illusion of finishing a TED talk and assuming we now know how we will use the snippet of wisdom in that video. Once we think we “got” the information, we don’t look back, we don’t check whether we internalized it, we don’t see if we can apply that learning to a problem of our own.

In the US culture, testing in schools is sometimes perceived as evil; though a necessary one. Ask someone what testing means, and you will hear all the critics about labeling, grading, force-ranking people. But guess what. That is testing at its worst, and I believe that is what makes us miss the real learning opportunity today.

Testing shows the way

Tests, when done right, put us in the driver’s seat. They force us to make a judgment, give us deep awareness about what we are missing to make the right call in the future, when the right call will be of great importance. Tests reveal to us what we are strong at, and what we are weak at. Tests show us the path, so that we know what we know and what we don’t. Testing is the due diligence on our learning performance. When used as a learning method, there is almost no better way to learn something, anything, deeply.

I know what you just thought. When you heard the word test, you visualized the endless stream of multiple choice questions you once tackled to prove to others that you deserve whatever you were shooting for. While that is indeed a test, that is not the only one. Testing is a much broader concept. Practically, you are testing yourself whenever you force yourself to produce an answer, before you see the answer. And that moment is not about grading, not about labeling you. Plain and simple: that moment is all about confronting yourself to see whether you actually know stuff. That simple.

One thing I learned

Not convinced? Here’s my advice. Test this theory yourself, on your own terms. Make this post the first experiment and challenge yourself. Don’t just move to the next article. First, see if you acquired something from this post. I know you want to read a lot, and read fast, but just for once, do your reading differently, and embrace the thrill of cold calling.

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Stages of Creativity

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Stages of Creativity

First, you’ve got to recognize that there is a creative challenge. The research on innovation in business shows there are two approaches: exploitation and exploration.

  • In exploitation the creative challenge is to find new ways to make the most of the products you’ve got.
  • In exploration you look widely to see what else you could do that is new and different.

Leaders need to know when to explore, when to exploit – and how. And that starts with the simple awareness of what you are doing. Then there’s taking on a creative challenge. Highly creative people immerse themselves in everything they can learn about that challenge – and range far more widely than most others. That’s because a creative insight means putting together original elements in a fresh, useful way – and you never know where those pieces will come from.

This wide immersion requires an open awareness, a form of attention that lets the mind wander freely. Mind wandering, which has a bad reputation, is actually a crucial stage in creativity. It lets us come up with those precious new combinations of different elements, the one that will pay off in a creative insight.

But once you have the creative insight, you need to put it to use, to make it real. This is where many innovative people fail: they come up with terrific ideas, but do not know how to actualize them. Very often this means getting other people on board, whether a team, a teacher, colleague, or classmate.

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Mobilizing the help you need to actualize the insight requires social intelligence and relationship skills. Competencies here include understanding how other people think so you can put things in ways they understand, and other persuasion skills; collaboration and teamwork.

 

Test Your Lateral Thinking Skills

The following questions will test your ability to think laterally. If you get more than 50% of these right you’re certainly strong on your lateral thinking skills . To try the quiz click here…

Lateral Thinking

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Lateral thinking, is the ability to think creatively, or “outside the box” as it is sometimes referred to in business, to use your inspiration and imagination to solve problems by looking at them from unexpected perspectives. Lateral thinking involves discarding the obvious, leaving behind traditional modes of thought, and throwing away preconceptions.

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” Steve Jobs (founder of Apple)

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”Edison

“The great composers did not set to work because they were inspired but became inspired because they were working.” Ari Kiev

“An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”Edwin Land

Problem Solving & Effective Decision Making

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Lateral Thinking Quiz

The following questions will test your ability to think laterally.

If you get more than 50% of these right you’re strong on your lateral thinking skills (or maybe you’re just good at quizzes!)

If you get more than 80% of these right you’re certainly very strong on your lateral thinking skills (and we want to know you better)

  1. A graduate applying for pilot training with a major airline was asked what he would do if, after a long-haul flight to Sydney, he met the captain wearing a dress in the hotel bar. What would you do?
  2. If you have two coins totaling 11p, and one of the coins is not a penny, what are the two coins?
  3. A man built a rectangular house, each side having a southern view. He spotted a bear. What colour was the bear?
  4. If you were alone in a deserted house at night, and there was an oil lamp, a candle and firewood and you only have one match, which would you light first?
  5. What can you put in a wooden box that would make it lighter? The more of them you put in the lighter it becomes, yet the box stays empty.
  6. Which side of a cat contains the most hair?
  7. The 60th and 62nd British Prime Ministers of the UK had the same mother and father, but were not brothers. How do you account for this?
  8. How many birthdays does a typical woman have?
  9. Why can’t a man living in Canterbury be buried west of the River Stour?
  10. Divide 40 by half and add ten. What is the answer?
  11. To the nearest cubic centimetre, how much soil is there in a 3m x 2m x 2m hole?
  12. Is it legal for a man to marry his widow’s sister?
  13. If you drove a coach leaving Canterbury with 35 passengers, dropped off 6 and picked up 2 at Faversham, picked up 9 more at Sittingbourne, dropped off 3 at Chatham, and then drove on to arrive in London 40 minutes later, what colour are the driver’s eyes?
  14. A woman lives on the tenth floor of a block of flats. Every morning she takes the lift down to the ground floor and goes to work. In the evening, she gets into the lift, and, if there is someone else in the lift she goes back to her floor directly. Otherwise, she goes to the eighth floor and walks up two flights of stairs to her flat. How do you explain this?
  15. A window cleaner is cleaning the windows on the 25th floor of a skyscraper, when he slips and falls. He is not wearing a safety harness and nothing slows his fall, yet he suffered no injuries. Explain.
  16. The band of stars across the night sky is called the “…… Way”?
  17. Yogurt is made from fermented ……..
  18. What do cows drink?
  19. A farmer has 15 cows, all but 8 die. How many does he have left?
  20. The Zorganian Republic has some very strange customs. Couples only wish to have female children as only females can inherit the family’s wealth, so if they have a male child they keep having more children until they have a girl. If they have a girl, they stop having children. What is the ratio of girls to boys in Zorgania?
  21. If the hour hand of a clock moves 1/60th of a degree every minute, how many degrees will it move in an hour?
  22. How many hands does the clock of Big Ben have?
  23. How many degrees are there between clock hands at 3.15 pm?
  24. How many times do the hands of a clock overlap in 24 hours?
  25. John’s mother has 3 children, one is named April, one is named May. What is the third one named?
  26. You are running in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?
  27. In the same race, if you overtake the last person, then you are in what position?
  28. Using just ONE straight cut, how can you cut a rectangular cake into two equal parts when a rectangular piece has already been removed from it?
  29. A man went into a store to buy an item. He asked the assistant:
    “How much does it cost for one?”
    The assistant replied 2 pounds, Sir”
    “And how much for 10?”
    The assistant replied “£4”
    “How much for 100?”
    He got the reply “£6”
    What was the man buying?
  30. A man and his son were in a car crash. The father was killed and the son was taken to hospital with serious injuries. The examining doctor exclaims: “But, this is my son!”.
    How can this be?
  31. There are 23 football teams playing in a knockout competition. What is the least number of matches they need to play to decide the winner?
  32. You have to choose between three rooms.
    The first is full of raging fires
    The second is full of tigers that haven’t eaten in 3 years.
    The third is full of assassins with loaded machine guns.
    Which room should you choose?
  33. Three of the glasses below are filled with orange juice and the other three are empty. By moving just one glass, can you arrange the glasses so that the full and empty glasses alternate?
    six glasses
  34. Name three consecutive days in English without using the words Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturdaynine dots
  35. What’s unusual about this paragraph? Just how quickly you can find out what is so funny about it. It looks fairly ordinary and plain that you might think nothing is wrong with it. In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is highly curious though. Study it and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you could just find out.
  36. Join all the 9 dots on the right using four straight lines or less, without lifting your pen and without tracing the same line more than once. Do copy this onto paper if you wish to make it easier.

END of QUIZ

“The fear of making a mistake, of risking an error, or of being told you are wrong is constantly with us. And that’s a shame. Making mistakes is not the same thing as being creative, but if you are not willing to make mistakes, then it is impossible to be truly creative. I f your state of mind is coming from a place of fear and risk avoidance, then you will always settle for the safe solutions—the solutions already applied many times before.

Failing is fine, necessary in fact. But avoiding experimentation or risk—especially out of fear of what others may think—is something that will gnaw at your gut more than any ephemeral failure. A failure is in the past. It’s done and over. In fact, it doesn’t exist. But worrying about “what might be if…” or “what might have been if I had… ” are pieces of baggage you carry around daily. They’re heavy, and they’ll kill your creative spirit. Take chances and stretch yourself. You’re only here on this planet once, and for a very short time at that. Why not just see how gifted you are?” Daniel Garr

 

Answers:

  1. Offer to buy her a drink! The captain was of course a woman. Many airlines are now hot on equal opportunities and a candidate who had difficulty envisaging that an airline captain might be female would not go very far!
  2. 10p and 1p - the other coin can be a penny!
  3. White. Only at the North Pole can all four walls be facing South.
  4. The match!
  5. Holes
  6. The outside
  7. Churchill was Prime Minister twice, from 1940 to 45 and from 1951 to 55.
  8. One
  9. Because he is still alive .
  10. 90. Dividing by half is the same as multiplying by 2.
  11. None - it’s a hole!
  12. No - because he’s dead.
  13. The colour of your eyes.
  14. The woman is of small stature and couldn’t reach the upper lift buttons.
  15. He was cleaning the inside of the windows.
  16. Milky Way
  17. MilkPicture of Big Ben
  18. Water. After the previous two questions, did you answer milk?
  19. Eight
  20. About 1 to 1. Any birth will always have a 50% chance of being male or female.
  21. One
  22. Eight: there are four faces to the clock of Big Ben (see the picture to the right)
  23. Not zero degrees as you might at first think. The minute hand will be at 15 minutes (90 degrees clockwise from vertical) but the hour hand will have progressed to one quarter of the distance between 3 pm and 4 pm. Each hour represents 30 degrees (360 / 12), so one quarter of an hour equals 7.5 degrees. So the minute hand will be at 97.5 degrees: a 7.5 degree difference between the hands.
  24. 22: the minute hand will go round the dial 24 times, but the hour hand will also complete two circuits. 24 minus 2 equals 22.lateral thinking
  25. John
  26. If you overtake the second person then you become second.
  27. You can’t overtake the last person in a race!
  28. Cut it horizontally half way up (i.e. parallel to the top) . See right
  29. House numbers.
  30. The doctor was his mother. Going full circle, this is very similar to the first question.
  31. In a knockout competition, every team except the winner is defeated once and once only, so the number of matches is one less than the number of teams in this case 23-1 = 22.
  32. The second room. Tigers that haven’t eaten in three years are dead!
  33. Pour the juice from the second glass into the fifth.
  34. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.nine dots with answer
  35. The letter e doesn’t appear once in the paragraph.
  36. Here is one possible solution. Of course you have to go beyond the boundaries of the square of dots to solve this.
    Out of interest this particular puzzle is where the expression “to think outside the box” originally came from.

Score

  • Over 33. You are a true lateral thinking Guru. Edward De Bono would be proud of you. Or maybe you are the man himself.
  • 28 to 32. Very good.
  • 21 to 27. Quite good.
  • 15 to 20. Average.
  • Under 15 - watch The Matrix, The Simpsons and Dr Who a few more times.

 

The final test!

Pick one of the following cards:

Card Trick


Once you have done this scroll down to the bottom of the page.When you have chosen your card, focus carefully on it and keep it clearly in your mind for 15 seconds.

 

Here are some web sites which will allow you to take lateral thinking further.

  • Now try our Second lateral thinking test
  • Riddles: lateral thinking again!
  • For some more logic problems see our Case Interviews page
  • Timed verbal logical reasoning test
  • Institute of Practitioners in Advertising Diagonal Thinking Self-assessment Tool
  • IPA Copywriting Test
  • The most difficult application forms
  • Can creativity be taught?

Your card has been removed!

 

Card Trick

Beyond learning styles

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Beyond learning styles by: Annie Murphy Paul

Whenever I speak to audiences about the science of learning, as I’ve been doing a lot this fall, one topic always comes up in the Q&A sessions that follow my talk: learning styles.

Learning styles—the notion that each student has a particular mode by which he or she learns best, whether it’s visual, auditory or some other sense—is enormously popular. It’s also been thoroughly debunked.

The scientific research on learning styles is “so weak and unconvincing,” concluded a group of distinguished psychologists in a 2008 review, that it is not possible “to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice.” A 2010 article was even more blunt: “There is no credible evidence that learning styles exist,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham and co-author Cedar Riener. While students do have preferences about how they learn, the evidence shows they absorb information just as well whether or not they encounter it in their preferred mode.

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This doesn’t mean, however, that teachers and parents should present material to be learned in just one fashion. All learners benefit when information is put forth in diverse ways that engage a multitude of the senses. Take, for example, a program that teaches math using music. At Hoover Elementary School in Northern California, a group of third-graders learned to connect the numerical representation of fractions with the value of musical notes, such as half-notes and eighth notes. Fractions are notoriously difficult for young students to grasp, and a failure to catch on early can hobble their performance in math into middle and high school. Clapping, drumming and chanting gave these pupils another avenue through which to understand the concept.

The lesson here: The “learning style” that teachers and parents should focus on is the universal learning style of the human mind, and two characteristics of it in particular.

First, students benefit from encountering information in multiple forms. They learn more, for example, from flashcards that incorporate both text and images—charts, graphs, etc.—than from cards that display text alone.

Second, students’ interest is kept alive by novelty and variety, so regularly turning away from textbooks and blackboards is key. As long as the new activity genuinely informs the students about the academic subject at hand, clapping a math lesson—or sketching in science class, or acting during story time—can help every student to learn better.

One more thought about learning styles: instead of dividing learners into categories such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, a classification I find much more useful is the one proposed by historian and educator Ken Bain, author of the bookWhat the Best College Students Do. In Bain’s scheme, there are three types of learners:

  1. surface learners, who do as little as possible to get by;
  2. strategic learners, who aim for top grades rather than true understanding; and
  3. deep learners, who leave college with a real, rich education.

Bain then introduces us to a host of real-life deep learners: young and old, scientific and artistic, famous or still getting there. Although they each have their own insights, Bain identifies common patterns in their stories. You can read more about these deep learners (they include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Stephen Colbert) on the Brilliant Blog, here. And right now, take a moment to appraise your own “learning style”: is it surface, strategic, or deep?

You can email the author at annie@anniemurphypaul.com. You can also visit her website, follow her on Twitter

learning style

learning strategies

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What’s the key to effective learning? One intriguing body of research suggests a rather riddle-like answer:

It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know.

To put it in more straight forward terms, anytime a student learns, he or she has to bring in two kinds of prior knowledge: knowledge about the subject at hand (say, mathematics or history) and knowledge about how learning works. Educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself—the “metacognitive” aspects of learning—is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.

“Metacognition” is often simply defined as “thinking about thinking.”

Metacognition refers to higher order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning. Activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task are metacognitive in nature. Because metacognition plays a critical role in successful learning, it is important to study metacognitive activity and development to determine how students can be taught to better apply their cognitive resources through metacognitive control.

In most of the teaching institutions, “the emphasis is on what students need to learn, whereas little emphasis—if any—is placed on training students how they should go about learning the content and what skills will promote efficient studying to support robust learning,”John Dunlosky, professor of psychology at Kent State University in Ohio”

Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content, because acquiring both the right learning strategies and background knowledge is important—if not essential—for promoting lifelong learning.”

Research has found that students vary widely in what they know about how to learn, according to a team of educational researchers from Australia writing last year in the journal Instructional Science. Most striking, low-achieving students show “substantial deficits” in their awareness of the cognitive and metacognitive strategies that lead to effective learning—suggesting that these students’ struggles may be due in part to a gap in their knowledge about how learning works.

Teaching students good learning strategies would ensure that they know how to acquire new knowledge, which leads to improved learning outcomes. Students who use appropriate strategies to understand and remember what they read, such as underlining important parts of the texts or discussing what they read with other people, perform mush better (equivalent to one full school year) in their assessments.

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Students can assess their own awareness by asking themselves which of the following learning strategies they regularly use (the response to each item is ideally “yes”):
• I draw pictures or diagrams to help me understand this subject.
• I make up questions that I try to answer about this subject.
• When I am learning something new in this subject, I think back to what I already know about it.
• I discuss what I am doing in this subject with others.
• I practice things over and over until I know them well in this subject.
• I think about my thinking, to check if I understand the ideas in this subject.
• When I don’t understand something in this subject I go back over it again.
• I make a note of things that I don’t understand very well in this subject, so that I can follow them up.
• When I have finished an activity in this subject I look back to see how well I did.
• I organize my time to manage my learning in this subject.
• I make plans for how to do the activities in this subject.

Research shows that those students who used fewer of these strategies reported more difficulty coping with their schoolwork. Educators can use a series of proactive questions which they can drop into the lesson on a “just-in-time” basis—at the moments when students could use the prompting most. These questions, too, can be adopted by any educator to make sure that learners know not just what is to be learned, but how.

• What is the topic for today’s lesson?
• What will be important ideas in today’s lesson?
• What do you already know about this topic?
• What can you relate this to?
• What will you do to remember the key ideas?
• Is there anything about this topic you don’t understand, or are not clear about?

 

What Is Your Learning Style?

This quiz asks 24 questions and will take less than five minutes to complete. Try not to think too hard — just go with your first thought when describing your daily activities and interests. By the end, you may have some new insights into your learning preferences.

This article has been based on an article by Annie Murphy Paul.

You can email her at annie@anniemurphypaul.com.

You can also visit her website, follow her on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!

Learning Styles

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Extract from the Article on Learning Styles by: Christopher Pappas

There are 7 main Learning Styles, but the first three are the most common and widely used:

  1. Visual: Where learners prefer to use pictures, images and spatial understanding
  2. Aural: Where learners prefer acoustic stimuli
  3. Kinesthetic: Where learners prefer to use their body, hands, gesturing and touching
  4. Verbal: Where learners prefer speech and writing
  5. Mathematical: Where learners prefer using logic and reasoning
  6. Interpersonal: Where learners prefer to learn and function within groups
  7. Intrapersonal: Where learners prefer self-study and to learn alone

Advocates of the learning style theory argue that instructors can achieve much better results when they take their student’s learning style under consideration and create a course that best fits this exact style.

The adversaries of the learning style theory say that this concept is misunderstood and not scientifically proven, and they argue that learning styles do make instructors understand what motivates and cerebrally stimulates their students, but they can’t guarantee a successful outcome nor predict it.

So where is the truth in that and where lies the Learning Styles myth?

What truth lies beneath?

  • First of all, it’s true that people are different and that these exact differences affect the way they learn. Some have special needs. Some have special abilities. And no one can argue that intelligence comes in various levels and forms.
  • Second, people have different interests and when someone is interested in a subject, chances are that he will learn about it faster and more in depth.
  • Third, learners have diverse backgrounds, something that undoubtedly affects their learning.
  • And, last but not least, there are people with various learning disabilities, something that ultimately affects the way they learn and that requires a special approach on behalf of the instructor.

learning Strategies

What’s the key to effective learning? Read the learning strategies post.

It’s not just what you know. It’s what you know about what you know.

Debunking the myth of Learning Styles

  • There is no convincing evidence to prove that when an instructor changes the presentation mode of his course to match the learning style of his students actually helps them learn.
  • There is no “better” or “faster” learning as an outcome of implementing individual preferences into a course. It’s just a style that ultimately makes no difference in learning.
  • Instructors should not just take under consideration the learning styles of their students, but also their background and interests.
  • Content is the parameter that should directly affect the mode of presentation and not the learning style of the students.
  • It’s definitely more efficient to create a course based on the motivational characteristics of the students and not their learning styles, and always be ready to adjust the learning methods and techniques and engage multiple senses rather than just one.
  • Perceptual learning has to do with senses and there is nothing restrictive about that. It doesn’t prove that someone is a specific type of learner. It merely suggests that people have preferred learning styles.
  • Not all learning happens the same way and nor should teaching. What’s crucial is to decide which techniques are best for which learning outcomes and not about customizing a course based on learning styles.
  • We mostly think of learning styles as de facto, without questioning their true value, purpose and relevance. And the truth is that according to recent research conducted by major US universities there is no correlation between learning styles and successful learning.

 

Christopher Pappas

Founder of The eLearning Industry.

via The Myth of Learning Styles.