Prompting Learning

The brain is a complex piece of machinery. It’s capable of keeping track of a myriad of things – your first grade teacher’s name, your upcoming flight itinerary, how much is left in your checking account, all your sibling’s birthdays. . . and then it is capable of completely purging what you learned in that training class last week.

Part of the reason that we purge things is that they hold no meaning for us. One of the tricks we can use to help our learners to retain information is to enable them to encode meaning to the topic. When people associate some kind of personal meaning to new information, it is much more likely they will remember it.

Here are some ideas:

• When teaching a sales class, give participants 10 or 15 minutes to write the script they will use for their upcoming conversation with Client X. Don’t give them a generic assignment of writing the script, but a more personal assignment of, “Choose a client you intend to call on next week. Write the script with him in mind.”

• When teaching a new hire, ask them, “How is this similar (or different) to what you did at your last job?”

• When teaching leadership skills, ask “Who can bring this concept to life with an example from your own work as a new supervisor or manager?”