I share literature, webpages, blogs and videos that I find inspiring or useful, that might do the same for you.
How People Learn, by Nick Shackleton-Jones
Why would you spend time reading this book?
You have it right in the title, how people learn. Nick Shackleton-Jones shares his perspective, experience and the latest neuroscience research on how we learn and how traditional education is stuck in a paradigm that is 200 years old. The world has moved on, but we still base the way we design training, learn and develop, on and educational system that was design to prepare us for factory labour to support the industrialisation in the 1860s.
What can you learn from this book?
Shackleton-Jones introduces the affective context model as a general theory if learning that describes what learning is. Nick argues that we need to understand the learners concerns or what’s important for them to enable them to learn. It will be the individuals personal reasons and objectives that need to be taken into account.
Learning is being defined as a change in behaviour or capability as a result of your memory. The affective models claiming that memory is being encoded by your emotional reactions to events and information and how those make you feel. In other words, we need to wrap learnings into stories that makes an emotional cognitive mark with our students for the to remember and act differently than before.
With this understanding you will be introduced to the 5Di – the learning design model that encapsulates 1. Define 2. Discover 3. Design 4. Develop 5. Deploy and finally the 6st step, Iterate.
I found the “How people Learn” refreshing and add a lot of consideration, and new thoughts based on neuroscience and research that really resonated with me. This is a must read for any training & development practitioner that is serious about learning.