LEARNING PRINCIPLE #7: OVERLEARNING

LEARNING PRINCIPLE #6: PROCESS DEEPLY TO RETAIN MORE

LEARNING PRINCIPLE #5: SPACE YOUR PRACTICE OUT

LEARNING PRINCIPLE #4: QUICKER, DEEPER, MORE ACCURATE FEEDBACK CYCLES

LEARNING PRINCIPLE #3: LEARN ACTIVELY

LEARNING PRINCIPLE #2: TRAIN FOCUS AND PRODUCTIVITY

LEARNING PRINCIPLE #1: DESIGN YOUR PROJECT WELL.

LEARNING PRINCIPLES THAT WORK

what you learn. Ultralearners don’t passively absorb edu-cation, they create it.

Self-education. Even if you’re in school, a self-education mindset puts you in the driver’s seat, controlling how and

WHY ULTRALEARNING?

Step 1: Create a segment within your list of subscribers who have not

your subscriber has not taken action. This is typically at the end of a sales sequence when it’s clear that your subscriber has yet to buy.

The question “Why do you hate me?” is meant to increase the open rate of this particular email, but it’s the purpose of this email and the copy within that matter most. Ryan explains that this email is meant to get a direct reply so that you can understand, in the exact language of your subscriber, why

Step 1: Ask a question on a social media platform (or blog post) that has a specific answer. For example, if you’re in the health industry, you could ask: Which is healthier, spinach or kale? And why?

Survey-Centric Emails

If your student shares a specific strategy that you shared, link to the page on your site where that strategy is referenced. If it worked for your student, your subscribers will be curious to learn more about what you taught them.

The Student Teacher email focuses on a success story from someone in your audience and specifically highlights one of their strategies for success.

If in an autoresponder series: In this email, you’re opening up a bit and talking about a particular struggle you’ve had in the past. As a result, you become even more relatable. Because of this, I’d recommend including a CTA that asks people to follow you on one social channel that you’re active on so they can get to know you even more as a real world human.

If you have advanced email marketing features that allow you to segment and tag your subscribers, depending on the free resource, you could tag people who click on this link as being interested in whatever that free resource is about.

share too many, they aren’t a sweet surprise anymore. Plus, you run the risk of training your audience to only expect free material from you, which can backfire when you promote your products or paid products you’re affiliated with.

Free resources are okay to share throughout your autoresponder series. But I wouldn’t recommend sharing more than one every ninety days. When you

Value-Driven Emails

5 Universal Rules for 99.99999% of All Emails You Send

acquisition of knowledge but seeking direct application of knowledge, moving them from subject-centered to problem-centered learning.

In summary, andragogy is based on several crucial assumptions about the nature and characteristics of adult learners. These assumptions are different from those that form the theory of pedagogy, which explains how children learn. Adult learning theory suggests that as an individual matures, they become less dependent on instructors and more capable of self-directed learning. It maintains that adults amass a large number of life experiences, which form their strongest connections for their learning goals, and their readiness to learn is increasingly oriented toward tasks associated with immediate life roles. Adults also experience a change in the perception of time, no longer establishing long-term goals through the

CONCLUSION

Critical Incident Questionnaires (CIQ). Professors must teach course content, but the delivery of that content is what determines a student’s understanding and engagement. Critical reflection of content has value and importance when teaching adult learners. When classroom material is not presented in a way that aligns with student learners’ preferences, students may become frustrated and disengage in learning.

As students go through the Voices projects, they select a voice other than their own and assume responsibility as advocates for their voices for the entire semester. A series of reflections lead the adult learners to a perspective other than their own and provides them with a rich understanding of the perspec-tives of others, challenging them to become vulnerable and examining their own thoughts and actions they may not have previously acknowledged.

TEACHING METHODS AND STRATEGIES

Katsinas and Moecek (2002) noted that while many college students are well prepared for using technology, there is a large segment of the college student population, namely the non-traditional stu-dents who are first-generation college students, that have very little experience with technology. Thus, the use and integration of technology, then, becomes a detriment to persistence to adult learners who enroll in degree programs online to accommodate their work and families lives.

CHALLENGES IN TEACHING NON-TRADITIONAL STUDENTS

Motivation

The adult learner needs to know the utility and value of certain information before they can readily master it. The adult learner may need to be told or led to discover why certain knowledge is worth learning.

ADULT LEARNERS

Higher education continues to see a changing student population, with adult learners returning to college with the intention of acquiring credentials through a college degree, decreasing the number of students who fit the traditional 18 to 22-year-old profile, attend full-time, and live on campus (Barr, 2016).

INTRODUCTION

Active Learning Strategies for Teaching Adult Learners

Ben Huebsch (quoted by Berlin 1999, 255). At the end of the story, Dr. B. has aflashback, and the narrator calms him down:

Why is this so important? The rejection of fiction and fictional characters isjust the other side of the coin of the reluctance of postmodern theorists toconcentrate on the single case and on narration. Fictional texts can help trauma-tised people: Homer, who is a truly venerable author, is proof that everybody iscapable of writing about traumatic events without knowing the theory.

A flashback is a »plötzliches intensives Wahrnehmen von Trauma-Bestandteilen mit Wiedererlebensqualität« (Huber 2003, 69).7 Somebody is trig-gered by a fragmented detail and lives through an old situation as vividly as if itwere a real situation.

The reaction is natural, the disturbance is overwhelming. That is why traumatherapists try not to blame the victim: The victim is not sick. The victim did theright thing. And the later reactions (intrusions, lost memories, flashbacks, night-mares, hyperarousal, reenactment) are normal reactions, too.

The alternatives are fight or flight. If it is impossible to fight or flee (you are tooweak or the opponent is too powerful), freezing might be a good solution. Free-zing in no-fight-no-flight-situations may help you to survive.

PTSD is not a trauma, but a PTSD canoccur after a trauma, it can occur depending on the very person and its resources.Only the after-effects are problematical.

In concluding, it is worth taking a passing glance at yet another attempt to›re-invent‹ the chess board. Over the first five years of the 1920s, the Viennesecomposer Arnold Schönberg worked in his spare time on developing a newform of chess. One of the designs he came up with is strikingly similar toDuchamp’s pocket chess. Yet Schönberg took his experimentation one stepfurther: for his »Koalitions- und Bündnis-Schach«, he changed the rules ofthe game altogether (see Image 3).

Hesse puts his finger on a problem within modern society, but like Zweig, hefeels uncomfortable with the alternative he proposes himself. As in theSchachnovelle, there is a strong anxiety that while the popular form of thegame has become corrupted by chance, its more refined practice has becometoo academic and removed from the world.

The figures of the narrator and his friend Dr. B. appear to counterbalancethe image of chess dominated entirely by ›Stofftrieb‹, as personified in Czen-tovic and McConnor. B. is a man of learning – he is a doctor and comes froma distinguished family of academics. He promises an approach that comesmuch closer to the chess-ideal outlined by the narrator at the beginning ofthe novel.

Chess, the narrator suggests, is really something much more culturally sophis-ticated than a mere ›game‹ – like Heinse and Schiller, he envisions it as amediator between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Videos (e.g., Knox, 1986, pp. 118-120) are used to present information in an interesting way and/or to include more credible, famous, or entertaining resources.

Group surveys (e.g., Angelo & Cross, 1993, pp. 255-316) are a way to provide participants with topic-relevant information about the group itself.

Icebreakers (e.g., Berry & Kaufman, 1994; Dahmer, 1992; Pfeiffer, 1990, p. 10) are brief interactive exercises that encourage and prepare participants for interpersonal learning during a workshop. Icebreakers may be unrelated to the topic and simply used to “break the ice.” If an icebreaker is directly related to the workshop topic, it has the added benefit of being a “motivation grabber.”

Do you want to provide the context or have participants create it?

Do you want to use scripts, handouts, worksheets?

Will you utilize questionnaires or other instruments?

Do you want to be the main presenter of the information or should the process be more interactive and interpersonal, with participants providing information as well?

Are there different ways to present the information, such as via videos, overheads, handouts, and so on?

Designing Assimilating and Conceptualizing Activities

Designing Reflecting-on-Experience Activities

At the beginning of the last chapter, workshop design was conceptually divided into two sequential tasks—creating an overall structure for the workshop and designing specific learning activities. These two processes were compared to building a house and then filling it with useful furnishings. The design of particular activities that will meet the goals and objectives of the workshop is the topic of this chapter.

Workshops: Designing and Facilitating Experiential Learning

Practice is a better predictor of chess skill than intel-ligence, even among children with limited experience.This seems to be particularly true for highly skilled youngchess players as in our study the association of chess skillwith intelligence in this group was at best nonexistent andat worst negative.

that chess practice should not influence intelligence.

While one can imagine thatintelligence can cause practice because more intelligentchildren may be more interested in an intellectualendeavour such as chess, one can be relatively sure

Reasons for the lack of association betweenintelligence and chess skil

General intelligence and visuo-spatial abilities inchess —negative evidence

alculatingvariations/moves, that is imagining potential movesand representing future developments, has been thoughtto be one of, if not the main factor of chess skill

General intelligence and visuo-spatial abilities inchess —positive evidence

Part of the reason for “I know, but...” is that people learn from experience, which is a great thing (we wouldn’t want to live in a world where people didn’t), but it can cause some problems. The elephant in particular can be far more influ-enced by experience than by abstract knowledge.

Designing for behavior

Motivation to Do

8

Instead of hearing from the same students who always get the answers right, you can ask questions of your two lowest students, two mid-level students and then two of the highest-level students. If they all answer cor-rectly, it’s probably time to move on.

I write up my agenda on the board before each class. The agenda shows you have a plan for the class. For some students, especially skeptical ones, this is crucial to reducing anxiety and persuading them to come along with you.

How to Run Your Class

Correcting Others’ English

In Meetings

Any time you slip something slangy into a conversation, just restate it in other words right afterwards.

Speaking and Presenting

Taming the steamroller: how to communicate compassionately with non-native English speakers

ummary• M

emorization: tHe blunt force solution

ePetition anD memoryW

storytelling

tyPes of memoryS

eal vs. PerceiveD knowleDge

You want the information encoding to align with assessment and use.If someone is just going to need to recognize the right answer, then recognition activities are good ways to learn and practice. If someone needs to recall some-thing unprompted, then they will need to learn and practice by recalling, not just by recognizing.

n-context learning

long-term memory, or is it in your closet?

ort-term or working memory

mPlications for learning Design

If things are unpredictable, they can be harder to habituate to.

sensory memory

CONCLUSION

This need not be the case.

A state without citizens would not have any value; however,once a state is composed of individuals and begins to exercise collec-tive rationality in its engagement with other states, it becomes capableof bearing moral obligations.

This conclusion bears scrutiny.149 If astate lacks the agency necessary to realize a life plan, it is unclear howa state has enough agency to exercise supposedly self-interested be-havior on the world stage. Implicit in the notion of self-interestedbehavior, consistent with the Prisoner's Dilemma, is the notion of arational agent with enough foresight to have long-term interests(through subsequent iterations of the game). If the possibility of astate's life plan is rejected, then so is the entire applicability of thegame theory methodology to international law and international rela-tions; one would effectively have to throw out the baby with thebathwater.

The Moral Obligation of Groups

Bargaining Power

Can the same thing be said about states? Are they committed torationality as a value? The question is best pursued from the oppositedirection: how could we deny that states are committed to rationalityas a norm? States have interests and pursue collective projects on theinternational stage in order to maximize those interests.1 2 6 Thoseprojects involve rationality over time and necessarily require basicprinciples of rationality such as the transitive ordering of preferencesand fidelity to the principle of noncontradiction.127 The only relevantdifference between states and individuals is the lack of phenomeno-logical unity among the former.12 8 While each individual typically en-joys a unified phenomenological point of view, states are composed ofmany individuals, each of whom represents their own unified phe-nomenological point of view.1 29 But the lack of phenomenologicalunity of the state does not prevent it from exercising rational agency.

Rationality: Normative, Not Descriptive

INTRODUCTION

SELF-INTEREST AND NORM

Gauthier, drawing partially on the work of Bratman and others,points out that the answer is not so simple. 0 8 Even if defection at anygiven moment is rationally beneficial, this is not the right comparison.Pursuing the strategy of rational choice at each cardinal time pointmay turn out to be less effective than choosing an overall strategy orplan that is rationally justified and then sticking to it.

Compliance and the Rationality of Plans

Constrained Maximizers and International Law

Although the best possible out-come for a given player is defection in the face of compliance by allother competitors in the game, this outcome is also the outcome pre-ferred by one's competitors. If all competitors defect, the resultingpayoff is extremely low, effectively throwing the game back into a stateof nature where no one complies with any moral constraints, thus pro-ducing the worst possible outcome. The rational solution to the gametherefore requires acceptance of the objectively second-best (but, ra-tionally, only possible) outcome: acceptance of reciprocal moral con-straints on behavior.

of social contract theory that harnessed the power of game theory toexplain why rational actors would agree to a system that constrainedtheir behavior.6 0 Morals By Agreement provided, for the first time, afully realized model of rational self-interested individuals agreeing toa social contract of morality.

In 1986, the moral philosopherDavid Gauthier published Morals By Agreement, a novel interpretation

Law and Self-Interest

Bilateral Agreements

Multilateral Agreements

The whole point of international law is to create a structure wherebythe cost of shifting strategy away from compliance becomes higherthan it would be without legal regulation in that particular area. As aresult, each state in the Nash Equilibrium decides to comply with thelegal norm in question.

is indeed in his or her best interest, then the players fall out of NashEquilibrium.3

If one player decides that a shift in strategy (i.e., breach)

THE PRISONER's DILEMMA AND NASH EQUILIBRIUM

Game theory has been a mainstay in the international relations literature forseveral decades, but its appearance in the international law literature is of afar more recent vintage. Recent accounts have harnessed game theory's al-leged lessons in service of a new brand of "realism" about international law.These skeptical accounts conclude that international law loses its normativeforce because states that 'follow" international law merely are participants ina Prisoner's Dilemma seeking to achieve self-interested outcomes. Suchclaims are not just vastly exaggerated; they represent a profound misunder-standing about the significance of game theory.

counts conclude that international law loses its normative force be-cause states that "follow" international law are simply participants in aPrisoner's Dilemma seeking to achieve self-interested outcomes.

Recent accountshave harnessed alleged lessons learned from game theory in service ofa new brand of realism about international law.8 These skeptical ac-

some scholars concluded that compliance with international legalnorms was internalized as a value that formed one part of a nation'sself-interest. 6 In other words, fidelity to national values included, in-ter alia, compliance with international law, because some countriesview participation in the global legal order (or fidelity to its underly-ing norms) as an essential part of their identity and constitutive com-mitments.7 Therefore, compliance with international law was anational interest to be included with other more egoistic national val-ues.

Put another way, subjects sleeping normally lost most of their weight as fat, while subjects sleeping poorly lost most of their weight as lean mass (including muscle). And all of this was from just one hour of sleep less per night, five days per week!

Brace yourself for the results: Although there were no significant differences in total weight lost, there was an enormous difference in where that weight was lost from (that is, whether weight was lost from fat or muscle). For the subjects that slept normally, 83 percent of weight loss was lost as fat. For the subjects that were sleep restricted, this completely flipped: approximately 85 percent of weight loss was lost as fat-free mass!

CHAPTER 14

eat fatty fish once or twice a week.

The supplements in this tier (multivitamins and fish oil) are unique as their effectiveness will depend much more on your overall diet. Similar to how protein powder would not be needed if you can hit your protein target with whole foods, these supplements would likely be unnecessary if you already have a diverse diet filled with lots of fruits and vegetables and

list.

Caffeine has a large body of evidence supporting its use for cognitive function, increasing strength, prolonging fatigue, maximizing acute fat oxidation, sparing glycogen and much more (25,73). These benefits are why you find it at the number three spot on our supplement

Looking at the cellular level, ATP (adenosine triphosphate) breaks down to form ADP (adenosine diphosphate), a phosphate molecule and energy that can be used by our muscles. By supplementing creatine, we are able to increase phosphocreatine stores, allowing our bodies to rapidly replenish that lost phosphate molecule, meaning more ATP and ultimately more usable energy for quickly contracting muscles.

WHICH SUPPLEMENTS SHOULD YOU CONSIDER TAKING?

CHAPTER 13

Create a national or state-based system in which personalized learning advisors help elementary and middle school students and families explore the variety of learning opportunities available to them—in school, online and community based—that they may not otherwise know about or have access to.

A Call to Action

Ashoka has learned from its Fellows that empathy is a foundational capacity that children must develop to prepare them to then master other critical skills of teamwork, leadership and change-making. With the guidance of these fellows, we have been searching for Changemaker Schools across the United States that cultivate students as empathic leaders who can work in teams to solve shared problems. However, schools are not the only institutions that must support these skills in students. In order for all children to master these changemaker skills, museums must play a critical role in transforming the youth years.

Every Child a Changemaker

The TED conference has served over a billion videos since 2006, the year they started a small experiment to put videos online. They tried it, it seemed to work, so they tried some more, and now they have delivered a billion videos. The TED team didn’t do anything that a museum couldn’t have done—no aspect of TED’s strategy, tactics or operations requires huge teams or huge budgets, and even the TED motto, “Ideas worth spreading,” is hauntingly museumesque. But their vision, their sense of their role—their responsibility, their obligation—in the world of the 21st century is clear, as is their understanding of scale.

Museums in an Age of Scale

of us in America, and that blew me away. Every single place I went, they wanted to know how we do what we do. That is the good news that I bring to you today from overseas. There are other things to emulate in other systems, but what we have here in this country is one thing that they don’t have, and that’s the ability to create incuba-tional space where we say, What do you want to know? How do you want to learn it? How do we know that you’ve gotten it? When will we be done?

Have you been in an American classroom lately? It’s a noisy place; it’s a beautiful, chaotic, stimulating array. It’s wonderful, and in classrooms elsewhere in the world that just doesn’t exist. They wanted to know how we foster that chaos. How did we do what we do? They were envious of all

Lessons from a National Education

Currently I am organizing students across the United States to form a cohesive task force called “We the Students.” We are working on a National Student Bill of Rights, informed by what I hope will be thousands of fellow students and kids to clearly define the rights learners should have in the education system we desire. We will then transform this document into the foundation for a new certification process for schools, museums, libraries, etc., that shifts where value is placed in our system to where it should be: helping all children fulfill their passions and be the masters of their education.

as they say, are cheap. What we need most of all is pragmatic incentive to change. We need to shift where the system dictates money should go, even if it is only a small shift at first. Admittedly I am discussing more “cheap” ideas here, but for my part, small as it is, I am working to solidify some of these ideas.

Many, if not most, people want to see a shift in education towards a learner-focused system. But wanting change and changing are two very distinct things—especially when we talk at the institutional level. Ideas,

A Student Bill of Rights

This harkens back to 17th-century English coffeehouses, where people came almost every day to learn the latest gossip and news about what was going on in the town. These coffeehouses were extraordinary places for innovation, collaboration and, most important, the mingling of people with different ideas and from different fields. In today’s society, we are so detached from one another that most of us don’t even know our next-door neighbors. Most of us don’t talk to people in our community or neighborhood unless there’s an absolute need to do so. There’s huge potential for cities and communities to address this detachment, and I think museums, libraries, makerspaces and community centers are going to be a part of the solution.

After I came back from India, I moved from Bethpage, New York, to Syosset, New York—going from a middle-class school district to one that’s very wealthy and compet-itive, where a lot of kids are admitted into Ivy League institutions. Once I got into that school, it was a disaster. Many of the problems that I had been reading about were unfolding before my eyes. Kids were stressed out, very competitive, cheating and uninterested in anything beyond getting into college.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Taking It National and Global: A Value-Driven, Project-Based Learning and Innovative Credit-Earning Model

We know that kids spend only 14 percent of their time in school. And we understand that learning doesn’t start and stop at the school door. In Pittsburgh we’re focusing on principles of connected learning that link academic achievement, social networks and personal interests with smart mentors to spur young people to learn anytime, anywhere.

A City-Level Approach to Remake

critically, to communicate and collaborate, and to develop a problem-solving mindset that they can apply in any scenario.

To offer an explicit digital tool to K–12 educators, The Henry Ford created a game-changing digital curriculum, Innovation 101, which is designed to inspire the next generation of innovators and thinkers with stories of today’s innovators, told in their own words and juxtaposed with stories of legendary innovators. The curriculum seamlessly integrates 21st-century skills development in the methodology of instruction. Each lesson allows learners to reflect on real-life stories of innovators, to think creatively and

aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards.

In close collaboration with education partners, The Henry Ford used the “co- creation” approach and launched over 220 new and paradigm-changing educational curricula and resources aimed at changing how teachers teach and students learn. The new resources not only support national and state standards in social studies but also in STEM, 21st-century skills, English language arts, and career and technical education. They are aligned with Common Core State Standards and are now being

Igniting a Learning Revolution with The Henry Ford’s Innovation Education Incubator

It’s ironic that even though everyone is talking about innovation being the most desirable 21st-century skill, educators and students are still held captive in the least innovative teaching and learning environments. Most museums are eager to align their educational offerings with the ever-evolving standards rather than advocate for change in the curriculum itself. It is time to ask: Is more really more, or should we make room in the existing curriculum for creativity and innovation? If this change happens, museums will fit into the education and learning equation seamlessly.

Time for a Perfect Storm!

Signal: New Hampshire Virtual Academy requires parents to assume a “learning coach” role. With students who enroll in the school full time, spending an average of four to six hours on schoolwork each day, parents are advised to plan for 80 percent direct partici-pation in the early grades, 50 percent in middle school and 10 percent in high school. It seems challenging for even a well-educated and highly motivated parent to carry out this learning coach role while working full time.

Signal: Boston Day and Evening Academy shows how it is possible to remove constraints around learning for at-risk students and to make new design decisions appropriate to a particular situation. Its population of over-age and under-credited learners are organized into cohorts every 11 weeks based on their levels of mastery.

Glimpses of the Future of Education

school time. These opportunities are built around the growing evidence that anywhere, anytime learning can reinforce and extend formal learning, resonate with learners who don’t thrive in the traditional classroom and prevent the “summer slide” that is partic-ularly damaging to low-income students.

Inside-Out Urban Schools: The rise of after-school, summer and other expanded learning opportunities creates learning outside the traditional school building and

We see signs that the U.S. is nearing the end of an era in formal learning charac-terized by teachers, physical classrooms, age-cohorts and a core curriculum—what some people call the era of industrial-age learning. The signals presaging this transformation include the rapid increase in nontraditional forms of primary education such as homeschooling; near record dissat-isfaction with the existing K–12 education system; funding crises for schools at the state and local levels; growing gender imbalance in higher education; and prolifer-ation of digital content and digital delivery platforms designed to transform the nature of classroom learning.

Setting the Stage

horizons are being opened by technological advances in communications, content sharing and cultural expectations regarding access, authority and personalization. A new era is beginning, characterized by new learning economies based on diverse methods of sharing and using educa-tional resources.

Simultaneously new

They came at the invitation of the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums (CFM), and The Henry Ford, in response to forecasts from CFM and other futures organizations that America is on the cusp of transformational change in the educational system. The current structure has been destabilized by rising dissatis-faction with the formal educational system, the proliferation of nontraditional forms of primary education and funding crises at state and local levels.

About This Convening

Just like the end of the term, the end of each class is the best time to rein-force what students are supposed to take home. Whether by summarizing the lesson or quizzing students to check for and deepen understanding, make the end of each class matter. If students spend the last few minutes packing up (or leaving early), call them on it. By saying – and showing – that the end is the most important part of class, you create an incentive for them to stay focused. And if you usually end class with administrative tasks like collecting homework, push that up a bit so that the end of class is open for a really strong close.

End each class on a strong note.

Prepare a sub plan.

Many teachers collect homework at the end of class, grade it in a cur-sory fashion and hand it back a week or two later. Ten they wonder why students don’t try harder on it. Teir students recognize that the homework isn’t meaningful to the class or important to the teacher.

Homework is crucial.

Make your students write.

Ready, fre, aim.

Tell stories.

Don’t get too invested in what you design.

Develop a range of polished material to show of to potential employ-ers. Putting my ESL stories online has led to several jobs creating material that in no way resembled my original work. I’ve also gotten kind emails from teachers around the world who have successfully used these stories in their classrooms. It’s gratifying.

Share your materials freely.

Make titles and headings short and descriptive. ✓ Have ample margins, ideally 1” on each side, for read-ability and note-taking. ✓ Put one line of blank space between paragraphs. ✓ Number everything for easy reference in class. (“Let’s go to section II, question 1.”) ✓ Number sections with Roman numerals; number questions with regular-type numerals. ✓ Include a few diagrams or pictures, as necessary. ✓ Label all diagrams and pictures, even if it seems obvious how they relate to the text. ✓ Cite your sources in your materials the same way you expect students to. ✓ Number your pages if it’s three pages or longer. ✓ Put your name and the class name in the footer, so students know it’s for your class. ✓ Save your handouts in DOC and PDF format.

Follow these steps to make your handouts uniform, useful and beautiful. ✓ Use a serif font (like Times New Roman) for better readability. ✓ Use a readable font size: 18-24pt for titles, 14-18pt for headings, 10-12pt for text. ✓ Use the same font or two (max) for all your hand-outs. (I like using a sans serif font like Arial for captions.) ✓ Write instructions at the top of every handout. Do you want students to read it for homework, answer the questions and return it to you next class, or keep it as a reference? ✓ If students will fll it out and return it to you, put “Name:________________” at the top.

Develop your own materials.

not be obvious to students.

End each class with three things. First, review the day’s lesson. Second, connect it to the homework. Tird, explain how the homework connects to what they’ll learn next class. Connections that seem obvious to you may

Pace and motivate within each lesson plan.

On the frst day of class my students always do an icebreaker activity where they introduce themselves to a partner and discuss a life experience that taught them something. (Tey will naturally choose something sig-nifcant.) Ten students introduce their partner and their partner’s learn-ing experience to the whole class. Most of the learning experiences students share will involve dis-comfort: a divorce, realizing their kids could run circles around them, a life-threatening motorcycle accident... After everyone fnishes, I draw a modifed version of the discomfort zone diagram on the board and talk about how, as we just saw, the most powerful learning happens when we are uncomfortable.

Teach the discomfort zone.

Give ‘em a hook.

the survey tells you who your students are; the entry assess-ment, where they’re starting from.

Start with a survey and an entry assessment.

The frst day of class is the most important.

You can speed this process where appropriate with some simple, well-designed activities intended to help people improve their learning techni-ques, for instance explaining the importance of learning styles and askingpeople to identify their own preferences, explaining the Ladder of Compe-tence or introducing them to the MBTI. Using these tools increases thechances of learners being able to stand back from their learning and askthemselves what is going well, what is going less well, and what strategiesthey might use to build on strengths and overcome blocks. All of this willreduce the chances that they will project any frustration on to you, becauseunderstanding yourself and your own learning style is part of accepting thatyou are responsible for your own learning, not your tutor.

So if learning is about making connections and seeing patterns it becomespointless to devise teaching methods which are about transmitting facts. Thisdistinction is sometimes described as the difference between surface learningand deep learning. Surface learning is about remembering lists of data andcollections of facts. It is about memorizing and regurgitating uncritically.Deep learning is about connections, patterns and logic.

Modern cognitive psychology has suggested that our brainswork differently. Rather than proceeding as a linear process where facts areneatly stored, the human brain seems to work instead on the principle ofneural networks of association. We mentally arrange and store knowledge inclusters of related ideas known as semantic networks. When we learn some-thing new, we latch the new idea on to its nearest relative in an existingnetwork. Learning is thus about incorporating or modifying existing ideaswith new ones. It is essentially about recognizing patterns – in other words itis about problem-solving.

Five minutes of warm up exercises – gets people stretching andchanges the mood as well as being fun.I play a silly game called ‘Bat and Moth’ which involves peoplestanding in a group and chasing each other. It has no purpose otherthan to get people moving!I start my maths classes with five minutes of mental arithmetic – fastand fun.I ask people to describe what percentage of their attention I have.Answers vary from 20 per cent to 95 per cent. I then ask what needsto happen to get to at least 95 per cent. It’s fun and I get a lot ofuseful information too!

The more you can design learning so that people can work at their ownpace, the more effective it is likely to be. This is not because competition isideologically unsound, but because it doesn’t work. With adults this is espe-cially important. The older you are, the more likely you are to want tosacrifice speed for accuracy and the more likely you are to want informationbefore making a response.

four bi-polar dimensions, known as Preferences. The theory is that althougheveryone can call on each of the eight preferences, we are all likely to have apreference for one side of each dimension. This is the dimension in which we arelikely to have developed skill. All preferences are assumed to be of equal value

The framework proposes that human personality can be explained along

There are thousands of other per-sonality questionnaires and approaches to human personality and some ofthem have much merit. However, my personal favourite is the MBTI for its all-round versatility and also for the seventy years of research that has made itthe classic it is today.

Personality and learning

Anything airy-fairy and theoretical;learning that makes too manyreferences to the past or the futureand avoids drawing attention toNOW.

Practical problem solving;experimentation; chance to vary andmodify other people’s ideas;immediacy; relevance to ‘the realworld’; enjoy bending rules andseeing what happens; learning thatanswers the question ‘How can Iapply this?’