Accelerated Learning

In Sir Ken Robinson's TED presentation on our Education Crisis, he made an important point. It is a sad fact--but a fact just the same--that a large percentage of teachers don't know how to enable effective learning. This is true from grade school through graduate school. In fact, it is probably more true of subect matter experts (SMEs) than for anyone else.

The typical classroom is dominated by a death-by-lecture approach to teaching, often accompanied by stupor-inducing slides, whether PowerPointŪ or Apple's Keynote. And in the case of children, if a child becomes totally bored by the droning of the instructor and dares to become restless, that child will be seen as having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and drugged into complacency so as not to be disruptive in the classroom.

There is also the notion that adults learn differently than children, so we have a field called andragogy, in contrast to pedagogy. I consider this to be nonsense, and I know I will greatly offend the believers in andragogy. So be it. As Samuel Clemmons (writing as Mark Twain) once said, "The trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that isn't true." Right on!

The essence of learning is quite simple. Human beings learn by doing. This is true of content learning, but even more so for learning skills. Even a subject such as math is learned by sitting down and working through problems.

Almost no learning takes place in the classroom while a teacher demonstrates how to solve those problems. Most of us retain only about 30 percent of what the instructor presents, and we only become proficient when we practice what we saw demonstrated. (Incidentally, I was initially educated in electrical engineering, and have taken differential equations, advanced calculus, physics, chemistry, and all of the standard engineering subjects, so I know whereof I speak. I also earned Master's and Doctoral (Ph.D) degrees in psychology, so I can pile nonsense as high and deep as any college professor--but I choose not to do so.)

What's the Answer?

The answer is to insist that all teachers be taught--and practice--accelerated learning methods. These can be learned in as little as two days, so I'm not suggesting that we require a graduate degree in learning principles.

There are many sources of such education, and you can find them by conducting a Google search, but two especially good ones are David Meier's Accelerated Learning two-day workshop (www.alcenter.com) and a CD program by Donna Cercone called Mega Learning, sold by Nightingale-Conant (www.nightingale.com).