Will at Work Learning

Peer Instruction Inventor Eric Mazur wins $500,000 Minerva Prize!

Eric Mazur, who I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago in his on-campus office, won the Minerva Prize, which is dedicated to rewarding "extraordinary innovation" in teaching.

Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard University, developed the peer instruction method out of frustration with his students’ erroneous conceptions of physics. Too many of them utilized naïve mental models about the physical world in thinking about physics. Mazur wanted them to think like physicists. Unfortunately, his early attempts to improve their physics thinking had failed. He found that just presenting correct concepts was not effective in modifying his students’ faulty mental models.

Mazur’s Peer Instruction method begins with a question designed to surface misconceptions. Learners answer the question, and then talk with their classmates, before a class-wide discussion is engaged. By recognizing and confronting misconceptions, Mazur is better able to help his learners build correct physics conceptions.

To learn more about peer instruction:

1. Read Mazur's Book (which is focused on how to teach physics)
2. Look at some research
3. Read about it on Wikipedia
4. See Mazur on YouTube (this is very funny at times!)
5. Read about the Minerva Prize on the Boston Globe
6. Read Peer Instruction Blog by Julie Schell

 

Video about New Media and the Young Generation

Check this out (I can't say more):

Learning about the Financial Crises. Michael Lewis Interviews...

Michael Lewis's new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, sounds fascinating---and important.

Brad Pitt bought the movie rights, so it's clearly got an interesting story to tell.

Michael Lewis tells the story of the folks who first figured out that the financial disaster was coming (the one that caused our current Great Recession). Lewis shows how these oddball stock traders figured out how Wall Street was making huge mistakes---when no one else could see it coming.

The following two interviews are must reading if you want to know how we got into the economic mess we are in. They're also riveting storytelling for the most part.

Learning professionals should listen to the interviews---and read the book too---for two themes: (1) How do people's mental models make it hard for them to understand the changing landscape, (2) How attempts at persuasion often fail in the face of these mental models. You might also find it fun to consider how you would "train" the citizenry to have a better understanding of how its government and Wall Street tycoons failed, how financial markets work, etc. Finally, note how Michael Lewis (and the interviewers) set up the dialogue to make a very difficult topic understandable. Great stuff!!

Interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Aire
About 40 minutes.

Interview with All Things Considered
About 9 minutes.

Great Article on How to Create Great Teachers...

Great article on How to Create Great Teachers. It's focused on K-12 education primarily, but there is wisdom in the discussion relevant to workplace learning.

Here's the major points I take away:

1. Great teachers need deep content knowledge.
2. Great teachers need good classroom-management verbalization skills.
3. Great teachers need their content knowledge to be fluently available to them in the context of typical classroom situations. To get this fluency, they need to practice in such situations---and practice linking actions (especially their verbal utterances) to specific classroom situations.

Are We Snowed?

The following photographs I took with my cell phone (Samsung Omnia) looking outside my windshield while double-parked in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can click to enlarge the pictures.

Here is a question for you to answer:

Why do the snowflakes in the picture look like needles (or needle-like structures)? To make this more difficult, more than one answer is correct.

1. They broke apart while falling to the earth.
2. They were originally formed as needle-like structures.
3. They shattered into pieces when they hit objects.
4. The temperature of the air dictated the shape.
5. They combined into needle-like structures while falling.

See if you can guess one of the correct answers. DON'T FORGET TO HIT THE "VOTE" BUTTON !!

Survey Results - GlowDay.com

How This is Relevant to the Workplace Learning-and-Performance Field.

Most people will probably get the answer to the snowflake question wrong, even with a 40% chance of getting a correct answer. Most of us have only learned about the prototypical snowflakes, those with beautiful six-sided symmetry. But as it turns out, snowflakes actually can take many forms, including the needle-like snowflakes in the pictures above. Snowflakes formed at different temperatures form into different patterns.

Here are a few articles on snowflakes.

Article 1

Article 2

Why do we think of snowflakes as hexagonal even though we must have encountered other snowflake types throughout our lives?

Yes, we were trained wrong. Indoctrinated in the six-sided mental model of snowflakes, we haven't always been able to see what is right in front of us.

Does this sort of mental-model obfuscation happen in our field? You bet. It happens in every field.

Here are some candidate mental models that we ought to watch out for:

• Kirkpatrick's four levels.
• Learning objectives.
• Immediate feedback is always best.
• More information is good.
• Telling is sufficient.
• Learners know how best to learn.
• Providing feedback is enough to correct mistakes (it's not).
• Training is sufficient.
• etc. etc.

This is just a quick list. I'm sure I have my own blind spots.

The key is to recognize that we might be blinded by our preconceptions, we need to be open, and we need to have a way to get valid feedback on what we're doing.

Sometimes hiring an outside learning guru can help. Sometimes reviewing the research can help. Still, we need better feedback loops. We need to measure better.

I'm available to help.

Performance Support for High-Stress Situations

Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, administered the oath of office for the Presidency of the United States to Barack Obama on Tuesday January 20th, but screwed it up big time while relying on memory, even though the oath is only 35 words long.

He's a very smart guy and thought he could easily recall the words to the oath.

Steven Pinker, linguist and cognitive scientist extraordinaire wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times trying to explain the cause of problem, but as is often the case with grand theorists, missed a much more practical and important point.

When in situations of high stress, people may be better off relying on external memory aids (performance support tools) than their fallible memories. Actually, this is true for periods of low-stress as well. Our memories are fallible.

Later in the evening of the 20th, Roberts and Obama got back together to perform the task again. Hmmm. Let's see, two of the most powerful people in the world wasting time due to a learning-and-performance failure. What's the ROI on that?

Politics in Workplace Learning

Politics yuck, politics tricks, politics risk, politics fix, politics rules, politics is. Truth is, politics is the hand-to-hand application of anecdotal and scientific wisdom on human learning and cognition.

Here in the United States, we are in the middle of an exciting and critical Presidential election campaign. I love observing politics because I find it intriguing from a learning-and-cognition standpoint. Here are some things we (as learning professionals) can learn from the political wizards.

1. Repetition is worth repeating.
2. Space your repetitions over time.
3. Have powerful messengers repeat the key messages.
4. Authentic messengers are listened to longer and with more engagement.
5. Messengers who lose credibility (or integrity) are doomed.
6. Prioritize your messages. Brand your messages into a potent theme.
7. Vary the delivery of your messages, but stay consistent in the underlying message and theme.
8. Learning messages that are aligned with on-the-ground realities are the most powerful. It is only the very rarest of incumbents who can overcome a bad economy. It is only the rarest of learning messages that can overcome irrelevance or everyday business distractions.
9. When your efforts or credibility are attacked, fight back hard and fast. When candidates are attacked, they attack back, disputing the assertions. If your training efforts are impugned or criticized anywhere in your company, go on the offensive. Dispute the claims immediately and publicly. Let people know public criticism of your efforts will be met with vigorous rebuttals. Pull the criticizer aside privately and ask them not to continue their claims. Explain your realities. Educate them about the learning enterprise. Send out communications to key stakeholders disputing the claims, if not directly then indirectly by highlighting successes. After stopping the bleeding, listen to the complaints to see if there is truth in them. Fix the problems as soon as you can. Go back to the complainers and tell them how you fixed the problems. Ask the complainers for their support and ideas going forward. Remind them of your need for resources, support, etc. Help them solve their business problems. If you do get public complaints, see those as a warning sign that you are screwing up big time. Reach out and get better feedback on how you're doing and how you're doing politically. Build better feedback into your learning measurements and designs. Remember, if you're a leader of the learning enterprise in your company, you have a responsibility to ensure that the learning-and-performance efforts will work. If your training efforts have a bad reputation, the learning will never get the support it needs to move from learning to application and you'll never get the resources you need to get real results.

Bottom line: Embrace politics; it's only human.

Internet Changes Sex-Advice Column

Dan Savage, noted syndicated sex-advice columnist (warning: graphic discussions), said recently on the radio show Infinite Mind that through the years he's seen a change in the questions people are asking him. No longer are they asking him simple questions about what a particular sex act is, how to do it, etc. He's says the internet has changed what people want to know about. They can quickly google the basic stuff online. Now they want to know more about the deeper stuff, the relationship stuff, etc.

Hmmm.

Is there a parallel for employee-training situations?

Do we need to embrace deeper, more emotional, and/or more penetrating learning methods?

• Coaching?
• Mentoring?
• In-depth Articles?
• Questions and Answers from Experts?
• Group Discussions
• Collaboration?
• Management Involvement?
• Online Communities?
• Interpersonal Network Analysis?

Does this relate to some content and not others?

• IT Training
• Soft Skills
• Onboarding
• Business Acumen
• Ethics and Safety

Or, should we make sure we do a new round of needs assessment to explore how our learners are getting their information, what information they're getting already, what information they still need?

Or, should we just remember to ask ourselves, "What can we do to make training/learning sexy?"

Web 3.0 and Learning

The NY Times had a nice article in last Sunday's edition---on the front page above the fold---on the concept of Web 3.0, which may have implications for our field.

To give you a sense of what Web 3.0 is, here are some quotes from the article:

• "[The Web 3.0] goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion."
• "But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college."
• "[The holy-grail of Web 3.0 developers] is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: 'I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.'"

The goal then is to be able to analyze the information from the web and come up with quick and meaningful responses to queries people ask.

Hmmm. That's sort of a learning application in a way.

And, if we can create such systems, why couldn't we ask a query like, "I want to become a CLO at a socially responsible company, and I'm currently an instructional designer with an undergraduate degree in humanties and an MBA, plus 5 years experience as a leadership trainer. What do I have to do reach my goal and what do I have to learn?"

What would Web 3.0 mean for our field?

Nutritious Learning Design

For decades, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been touting schemes to attempt---at least ostensibly---to help Americans eat more healthfully. From the 4-food-group concept to the current food pyramid, the idea has been to help us think more intelligently about what we eat. The development of these formulations have always been under influence by industry groups representing food companies and health advocates, and it has never been clear that the resulting compromises have been effective. Note the current obesity epidemic as evidence.

But now, the Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain is taking matters into their own hands. Hannaford's nutritionists have developed a simple coding system to let shoppers know the relative health value of foods. Three stars is most healthy. Zero stars is least healthy. And while the coding system is simple, the underlying algorithm---the algorithm that assigns the ratings---is complex.

Listen to this: 77% of all the items on Hannaford's shelves rated zero stars. Even most of the Hannaford Store brand items get zero stars. Our choices are not very nutritious!!

As you might imagine, some manufacturers are not happy.

Only time will tell whether shoppers will change their eating habits---or whether food manufacturers will change the formulas for their processed foods to get a better star rating, and Hannaford will be able to track this data very easily. It's hard to tell whether the food pyramid has had an effect. Hannaford's Guiding Star system will be much easier to assess. I hope they've got some control-group stores to make comparisons.

I love the simplicity of the system. It's like a job aid on steroids. It's simple. It's provided exactly when needed (as shoppers make their selections), and it's based on proven nutritional recommendations.

Those of us in the learning-and-performance field can learn a lot from this design.

1. Ensure that learning designs impact performance situations.
2. Simplify, to increase how much your learners/performers actually use your stuff.
3. Base learning designs on proven content. For example, is the stuff you teach in your leadership classes really been proven to improve management performance?
4. Utilize systems to track your success, so that you can make

To read the excellent NY Times article, click here.