Learning is not an event, but a process resting on 4 pillars, called the pillars of learning. The same stands for training and employees training. It is a continuous and tedious process.
Those who believe the opposite, fall into the same trap as those who want to get rich overnight.
When you accept the fact that learning is a process and not an event, then you can assume the right attitude and you can apply the correct procedures to train your employees efficiently. So learning efficiently means doing things right and doing them repeatedly.
The 4 pillars of learning
Those are the 4 pillars of learning that have to be followed in order to learn a new skill or concept, and mainly in this order:
1.Information acquisition
2.Practice / Test
3.Corrective feedback
4.Memory consolidation
They are valid and important for efficient learning also in the process of training employees. In this article I will only expose them shortly, explaining why each of these steps is so crucial for learning. But I will dedicate to each topic at least one article, where I will go into detail.
You might find the 4 steps self-explanatory but you might have a problem with their numbering. Maybe you consider that consolidation should be step 2. Because after we learn something new, we want to consolidate the information before we apply it. Yes, there are situations when it is better to consolidate first the knowledge before going to apply it. But in some other situations, it is better to apply it first, because it will save you time in the consolidation phase. Those cases are different depending on what is the purpose of what we are learning.
Why are we learning?
Do we learn for reproduction, like students in school?
Or do we learn to apply like employees at work?
For example, in the process of training employees, the employees learn in their trainings to apply that knowledge in their daily tasks. Nobody will ask them to take out a paper and enumerate what are the procedures to be done in a unit test. They will have to take out their code and apply on it the procedures learned in the training.
The focus here is on application and results and not on the formulation of principles, definitions, and theorems. And in such a case, practice will save time in the consolidation phase.
Different persons use the same information differently. One might only need to know that “such a thing” exists, a manager for example. But an engineer might have to apply the information in safety-critical environments. In this case, he needs the highest level of retention.
This is the reason why, I am not giving the recipe for learning, but explaining the principles, the pillars. Once you understand those, you will be able to combine them to develop effective trainings for your employees.
1. Information Acquisition
The first pillar of learning is information acquisition. In classical, lecture trainings, it is when the trainer comes and explains the theory in presence.
Two main factors influence learning, during the first pillar of learning. Those are the teaching method and attention. Motivativation plays also a significant role. A special article is dedicated to employees’ motivation to learn during trainings.
1.1.Teaching methods
In order to learn, we first have to acquire the related information. But there are so many ways to acquire information: reading, lectures, audio-visual presentations, workshops, discussions, hands-on workshops, etc.
Each of those offers a different percentage of retention. The learning pyramid presents those percentages as follows (here is the same information in video format):
As you can see, the lecture type of trainings have the lowest retention rate. According to the learning pyramid, if you would ask your employees to read the material instead of having it presented, it would be double the retention.
1.2.Attention
So what is attention?
In simple words, attention means to be present, to attend, to be aware.
“When you pay attention to any one thing, you are putting all your awareness on whatever you are attending to while ignoring all other information that might be available for your senses to process and your body to feel” (Joe Dispenza – Evolve your brain)
In order to pay attention, first, we have to learn not to lose it. We lose our attention pretty often. Because we even have a brain mechanism that allows our mind to wander from one thought to another (daydreaming). Here is an article that describes the wandering mind in detail and shows ways to gain back control.
Research shows that the human attention span is approx. 30 – 40minutes. For this reason, the time allocated to learning is the greatest enemy that could boycott retention. If employees spend more time on information acquisition than their attention span, retention will diminish.
Here is an article and here is a video explaining how to allocate the time for learning to maximize your retention.
2. Practice (in employees training)
“With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment, and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.” Alfred Binet
In order to increase retention, practice is needed. Even memory, judgment, and intelligence can be increased by practice and training. Because people learn to do well only what they practice doing (stands also for employees).
Depending on what are we learning: a theory or skill, the second pillar of learning could be practice or testing. Just to calm down your emotions aroused by the word “test”. In this case, I do not talk about testing as a standardized assessment, what we know from school. But test as a method of active retrieval (remembering).
In the case of employees’ learning and training, the second pillar of learning is definitely practice. Application of the learned knowledge to daily tasks. Experience and practice are highly important for building new synapses in the brain.
3. Corrective Feedback
“It would be practically impossible to progress if we did not start off by failing” (Stanilas Dehaene)
When practicing what was learned, errors and mistakes will slip through, because they are part of the learning process. We learn from our mistakes only when we receive fast, qualitative, and corrective feedback. And here is where the trainer is mostly needed. Not in the presentation of the information, but in verifying how the acquired information was put into practice to offer corrective feedback.
“The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything” (Theodor Roosvelt)
There is the Rescorla – Wagner learning rule (Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner), a hypothesis formulated by two American researchers. The brain learns only when it perceives a gap between what it predicts and what it receives and “organisms only learn when events violate their expectation”.
So we must acquire information, but before applying it, we have to formulate a concrete expectation. And then compare the outcome with the expectation. If they coincide, it means that we learned, understood, and correctly applied the principle. Otherwise, our expectation was violated. We have an error, either in the understanding or in the application. An error has slipped in our internal model and we have to correct it. And exactly this correction process will help us learn.
Generative learning is the learning method based on trying to solve a problem without having the principle explained previously. It is called generative because the learner generates the answer rather than recalling it. Or generates the solution to a problem rather than having it shown.
4. Memory Consolidation
“Consolidation is the process of strengthening the mental representation for long-term memory.” (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel)
How do we measure our learning success?
By how much and how accurately we remember. It is not enough just to learn in a training. You must also consolidate the knowledge because new learning is labile, meaning it is easily altered.
So consolidation means “repeating the material” until you remember it. Sleep is also important for learning and memory. Memories are built during sleep in the REM sleep phase.
For simplicity, here I reduce the process of consolidation to two basic concepts:
- Repetition shall be done to store information. In this process, you create the neural circuits by repeated activation
- Reflection shall be done to recall/remember the information. You activate the same neurons, as in the process of repetition. Just that the information flows in the opposite direction. In this process, you strengthen the newly formed neural circuits.
Each of them has its “how-to” and “how-not to”. For example not any repetition is efficient. People tend to think that repetition means reading and rereading the text. But the research shows that this is just the illusion of knowledge.
“Rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create the illusion of mastery” (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel).
Well, then how it is done right?
There is a golden rule for learning through repetition described in this article.
