60. The Brain Science Behind Better Learning Design with Lauren Waldman

It really is fascinating how the brain works.

And Lauren will put more intellectual pieces behind this, given her expertise in this topic throughout our conversation, especially as it relates to attention, focus, memory, and of course, learning.

But one point that really stood out to me in this conversation was the importance of practice or rehearsal, as Lauren calls it.

I think many of us who work in learning and talent development, we know this intuitively or we've experienced it.

But we still fall victim to shortening or eliminating this practice time in our design.

And I want to say that I'm no different than you on this.

I feel the pressures from the stakeholders to include more and less time and trying to figure out how to keep it active and still share information and how much information do we need to share versus time spent practicing.

We know learning sticks when someone's able to practice a skill in real time during a learning program.

We know that practice is one of the main differentiators between simple information sharing and actual behavior change or learning transfer.

The transfer of the learning from the programmed experience to the on-the-job application and usage.

When Chris Taylor was here way back in episode 22, he talked about this.

He talked about how his own research revealed that behavior change is most likely to happen when two thirds of the learning experience is dedicated to practice and only one third to sharing information.

Think about that for a minute.

This means that in a one hour learning program, 40 minutes of that time.

Participants should be engaged in active practice.

They should be practicing the skill that they're learning.

And only 20 minutes of that hour should be the facilitator sharing information.

So this is tough, especially, again, when we live in a time where everyone wants us to cram in as much content as possible in as little time as possible and call it training.

But another example, Melanie Martinelli from the Institute for Learning Transfer, she was on episode 45 of this podcast.

She also touches on this topic pretty regularly.

Now, you may recall she talks about the 12 levers or levers, depending on what part of the world you're from and how you say that.

She and I are a little different.

Lever versus lever, the 12 levers of transfer effectiveness as per the work and research of Dr. Ina Weidenberger-Heidel.

Now, these are 12 aspects to learning design, 12 levers that greatly improve the possibility that behavior change will happen.

A few of the 12 levers of transfer effectiveness relate directly to this idea of practice.