November has wrapped her winds around the last of the leaves, making way for December and all its celebrations.  If you didn’t catch all the posts this month simply blow through the list below and click as you wish.

Learn well in the training & development learning well.

Dive deep into the learning well or take a small sip. Shower yourself in training & development or just get your big toe wet.

Refresh & refreshing.

As you wish.

• A social media training treasure hunt

• 10 things that go into picking a great team building icebreaker

• How mountains & cantaloupes go together when it comes to the high view

• The Rock.Paper.Scissors newsletter is out:
• Resources for matching how our brains work with how business & boardrooms could work
• Rethinking cubicles & classrooms: matching how our brains work with how business & boardrooms could work

• Fun & funny resources for using social media in training

• Push or pull – stubborn, damn doors are an insight into our conflict resolution psyche

• How to walk in another’s shoes or rather horseshoes

• What do brown M&M’s & technical requirements for training have in common?

• Oceans of opportunities open up with perspective game changer

• Are you ready to transform workplace learning through social media? If so, join me

Check out the entire e-newsletter here and/or see below for some funny resources related to his 12 Brain Rules principles.

• Related to John’s Brain Rules exercise principle check out this phenomenally creative way to encourage folks to exercise.  When was the last time you got this excited about working out?

• Related to John’s Brain Rules attention principle see this funny video clip about the dangers of not paying attention.

• Everyone needs to sleep.  Related to John’s sleep principle watch yourself melt as you see this guy’s technique for inducing sleep.

• My favourite Brain Rules principle is exploration.  If we don’t explore we can feel trapped.  Watch this uber creative video trapped in an IPhone.
  

Ronen’s Adventure: Trapped in an iPhone (A Video Jigsaw Puzzle) from Ronen V on Vimeo.

This month’s Rock.Paper.Scissors newsletter is a review of John Medina’s wonderful Brain Rules book.  John does a great job of inspiring us to rethink cubicles and classrooms.

Check out the entire e-newsletter here and/or see below for resources related to how to have our boardrooms and businesses working in sync with how our brains actually work (instead of working against how our brains work, which is how cubicles and classrooms are typically designed today).

John’s book outlines 12 principles for how the brains work.  I’ve taken some of those principles and matched them with resources for you.

• Check out John’s book here: Brain Rules; 12 principles for Surviving & Thriving at Work, Home & School.

• Regarding John’s Brain Rules exercise principle, see this infographic for how sitting is killing us

• I’ve bookmarked a bunch of brain-based learning resources in my Delicious account; access them here. 

• Regarding John’s Brain Rules stress principle, read a blog post I wrote about stress called Learning can be stressful; throwing learning to the dogs

• Check out a blog post I wrote about getting attention (another of John’s brain principles) called Looking for inspiration?  Try an add (especially these unusual ones from Fast Company)

• In terms of exploration, another Brain Rules principle, why not explore a variety of ways to soothe your brain & meditate via Deepak Chopra’s online meditation program?

Check these out, your brain will love you for it.

Educating for a change is one of my all time favourite books.  It’s a lovely blend of:

1.    Explaining what popular education is and why it’s important

2.    Example activities that you can use to effect change

As a learning and development specialist do you know what your pedagogy is?

Pedagogy technically means the teaching of children but it’s a popular term so we’ll stick with it.  The so-called correct term is andragogy but that technically means the teaching of men so it’s not all that inclusive either.

Pedagogy has to do with which particular methods and practices you use as a trainer.  There are many different pedagogies.

One kind of pedagogy is popular education, which lays out that education should:

-       lead to social change

-       be cooperative

-       recognize everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner

-       incorporate praxis (a constant cycling back and forth between theory and action)

-       be respectful

It’s hard to argue with any of the above but I’m sure you can easily think of times when you’ve been in a workshop where one or more haven’t been followed.  My 8:30 am university class with a prof who lectured from notes so old they were yellowed comes to mind.

Once you know your pedagogy / pedagogies it’s easier to design meaningful learning opportunities.  I use a blend of:

-       popular education

-       brain based learning

-       experiential learning

-       adult education

As learning and development specialists we’re in the business of change.  By laying out interesting, intriguing learning opportunities we are inviting our participants to change in some way.

Like what you’ve read?  Check out the book, a Canadian bestseller, now out of print, Educating for a Change, which you can download for free by clicking on the link.  Happy holidays!

The Educating for a Change resource is included in Rock.Paper.Scissors’ most recent e-newsletter.  Click on the link to see the newsletter and get more information about ‘Learning about change & the power of music to rock the world from United Nations ‘Messenger of Truth’ Sara Mitaru©’.

Attention: if you are a monk, currently in a sensory deprivation chamber or on a deserted island there’s no need to read this post.  Really.  Please go back to what you were doing.

If none of the above apply to you please read on.

Our brains aren’t sponges they’re sieves.

Unless you fall into one of the three categories above, you are constantly bombarded with things vying for your attention.  So many things that it’s a sheer impossibility to pay attention to it all.   From ads, emails, tweets, congested traffic, meetings, music, background conversations … our brains are constantly filtering out what isn’t important or urgent.

As a result we pay attention to what we think is important, relevant or urgent.

This is helpful.  It focuses us.  It saves us from the insanity of trying to read, know, be, do and have everything.

Alas our sieve can get ripped and let important things through.  And then, unless we’re on top of it, we’ll only find what we’re looking for.  And that’s dangerous.

One of my first jobs was working retail.  We went through a lot of managers.  All types from the guy who got so angry he pulled his phone out of its socket and threw it across to the room, to the guy who seemed to think it was funny coming onto a young girl.

Then there was ‘Mr. Chart’.  In his wisdom he had a large chart drawn up, with all of the employee’s names across the bottom and increments of moola along the other axis.  Our task?  As employees we were to watch our fellow employees for mistakes they made.  Then we were to calculate how much money we’d saved the store by pointing out the error and that sum would go on our chart, by our name.

It was a race to the bottom.  Everyone got busy backstabbing and spying.  General mayhem ensued.

The result?  We only found what we were looking for.  Mistakes.  Errors.  Gaffes.

We missed all the opportunities to find out what was working, the examples of great customer services, employee suggestions for new ways of doing things that would add to the company’s development.

Nope, none of that.  We were focused on what we were looking for.

What are you looking for?  As a trainer what do you look for – in your participants, in your content, in learning opportunities?  And in the process, what’s escaping your sieve?

When was the last time you learned something powerful in a group setting?

I’ve asked my workshop participants this very question hundreds of times and I can count on one hand the number of times someone relayed an example that took place in a university setting (see my caveat below).

Powerful learning is relevant.

Powerful learning pushes us so that we feel challenged, but not so hard that we fall and break our noses.

Powerful learning evokes emotion; it makes us feel alive, intrigued, curious and energized.

Powerful learning leads to change.

If powerful learning is all of the above then how come more of it isn’t happening in universities?  How come what we hold up to be higher learning doesn’t jive with how brain based learning, adult education, popular education and experiential education (all pedagogies or methods of learning) tell us we learn?

Want to know the answer?  It’s really quite simple.

Ready?

It has its roots in one of my ultimate pet peeves, the following popular equation:

content expertise + setting to teach said expertise in + students = learning

Ack!  Insert intense frustration, furled eyebrows, and raised blood pressure.

The mistake in the equation is the assumption that just because you know something means you can automatically teach it.  There’s a real lack of understanding that being able to teach and create situations of powerful learning requires an entirely separate skill set from whatever your content expertise is in.

You could be the best widget maker in the entire world.  This doesn’t mean that you necessarily can teach other people how to make widgets.

To read more about powerful learning and gets your hands on some related resources check out this e-newsletter issue of mine (I wrote it some time ago so ignore the upcoming events section, unless you have access to a time machine).

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Do you have subject matter expertise that you’re called on to teach?  Need to brush up on your teaching skills?  If you’re in the Vancouver Lower Mainland area you may be interested in a two day course I’m teaching on how to teach (Feb 1 & 2) called Mastering the Complexities of Group Dynamics at the Justice Institute.   Hope to see you there.

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Oh and my caveat about universities?  I don’t mean to slag them entirely, in fact I spent many years getting a few degrees under my belt.  My beef (or tofu if you’re so inclined) is that being in a lecture of hundreds is held up as the baseline for learning.  Not!