The HG2S Training Blog

Measured “return on investment” and “training effectiveness” are two of the business metrics commonly used to yoke trainers and developers in business and government training centers around the globe. “Is the training effective?” and “Is it worth the cost?” are standard queries at development meetings and design reviews. Knowledgeable designers and managers invoke Bloom, Kirkpatrick and things like ADDIE to promote development of effective training, little knowing that Pygmalion might provide the help they need.

A little over 40 years ago, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson performed a simple and ingenious experiment in a California school that jolted educational psychology. Dubbed the Pygmalion Effect (after the play by George Bernard Shaw; later the musical and movie My Fair Lady) the experiment showed that the effectiveness of teaching was largely determined by the belief of the teacher in the students. That is, all things being equal, if a teacher believes the students are exceptional, they will tend to match the expectation. Surprisingly perhaps, this “effect” has been replicated many times since its inception and has garnered support from similar studies done in colleges, industry and the military. What Pygmalion describes might be taken as the equivalent of the Placebo Effect in education, but it might just as well be a re-coining of the psychotherapeutic expression “you have to believe in the Process” directed toward the classroom.

What Rosenthal and Jacobson did in their study was give teachers false information about their students based on what they said was an advanced test to determine future performance and achievement. In reality they administered a standard IQ test, randomly selected a group of students without regard to the test results, told the teachers these students were going to bloom in achievement and sat back and noted the results. At the end of the school year the students were tested and the results showed that a significant number of the “bloomers” had in fact made unexpected gains in academic performance and behavior. In fact, tests of the same students two years later showed that they carried and maintained this advantage over that time.

Interestingly, while accounts of the first study did not include details of what went on in the classroom while the study was underway, written reports by the teachers themselves indicate that no special measures, programs or materials were provided to assist the “bloomers” in learning or to enhance the classroom experience. What Rosenthal and Jacobson concluded the “bloomers” got that the control group missed were clear signs of approval, more chances to interact with the teacher and patient acceptance, all moderated unconsciously by of the beliefs of the teacher.

Over the years the Pygmalion Effect has come under scrutiny by many researchers and has been criticized for its original experimental design and the general meaning of its results. But, all in all, it remains steadfastly rooted in the literature of educational psychology and provides a lasting contribution to the field.

References.

Rosenthal, R., and Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development’. New York: Rinehart and Winston. (Newly updated edition, 2003)

Rosenthal, R., and Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers’ expectancies: Determinates of pupils’ IQ gains. Psychological Reports, 19, 115-118.

Rosenthal, R. (1965). Clever Hans: A case study of scientific method. Introduction to Oskar Pfungst, Clever Hans (translated by Rahn, C. L., 1911). New York: Bolt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. ix-xiii.

George Siemens at elearnspace mentioned a remarkable site called Indexed in a recent blog post. Indexed author Jessica Hagy uses mathematical metaphors in sketches of relationships that span topics from consumption and arrogance to expectations, communications and perception. Hagy claims in her About page that Indexed “… is a little project that allows me to make fun of some things and sense of others without resorting to doing actual math.” To be fair to all the mathphobes out there, the mathematics is rather mild and, more to the point, Hagy’s adept skill at using Venn diagrams and xy-graphs reminds me of what must be one of the primary objectives we all face when creating technical graphics:  transform complex observations and relationships into simple and appealing visual designs. A good graphic after all is a data compression scheme. It’s no wonder then that it’s often easier for many people to remember the graphic than the explanatory text.

I wonder if the relationship between confusion and information is really parabolic? Hmm….

Dean José Bowen of Southern Methodist University is not only advocating an outrageous pedagogical overhaul that many see as dangerous and ill-conceived, he is in the throes of implementing it as well. His professors at the Meadows School of the Arts are now required to teach primarily without computers or, more precisely, without PowerPoint slides. An short interview with Professor Bowen can be viewed here.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Bowen’s technological denuding of the classroom is motivated by several forces he sees eroding the quality of education in American classrooms:

• Lectures are boring and are usually done badly.
• PowerPoint is a terrible educational tool.
• Lectures are not interactive and can be done just as well online.

In Bowen’s impassioned view there is little reason for students to pay extra for the privilege of residential college tuition given the deplorable state of the antiquated lecture system. Bowen suggests that it can be done cheaper and perhaps better by the online colleges.  Secondly, students have the option of going to open courseware educational sites (like MIT and Stanford) to see lectures delivered in a way that are “really top notch.” In essence, as Bowen sees it, students will vote with their fingers as it were and take their lectures at a cheaper and better online resource if things do not change. “They will pay less for better.”

Bowen’s call to reform the lecture hall starts by asking what role the class meeting serves in light of modern media like podcasts and online presentations? His answer, make the lecture worth attending by using it as a venue for exploration of ideas, spontaneous questions and answers, group projects and debates. Use technology outside the classroom to prepare for the classroom.

Not surprisingly the Chronicle sites problems from both sides of the lecture hall:

“The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.”

A previous foray into “inverting the classroom” at Miami University in Ohio evoked similar reactions from the students:

“‘Initial response is generally negative until students start to understand and see how they learn under this new system,’ says Glenn Platt, a professor of marketing at Miami who has published academic papers about the approach, which he calls the ‘inverted classroom.”’The first response from students is typically, ‘I paid for a college education and you’re not going to lecture?””

Both Bowen’s and Platt’s views converge on one nagging conclusion: We have to create good reasons for students to come to lectures. If not they will tune out, turn off, and probably go elsewhere. It seems ironic that in an age of mobile computing, electronic media and information at the speed of light that the lecture hall may only survive if it returns as a low-tech 21st Century edition of the classical academy. Time will tell which particular approaches favor this revitalization of the classroom but it is hard to deny that it is desperately needed.

Further Information.

Teach Naked: Dean Urges Tech-Free Classes (NPR)

Teaching Naked: Why Removing Technology from your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning

In addition to being a Nobel Laureate (1965), great story teller, and perhaps the most passionate and unrelenting student of physics in the 20th century, Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was also one of the greatest contemporary teachers of physics. His Feynman Lectures are no less than a gold standard in science education and still inspire and inform students more than 40 years after they were first given. Many professional physicists I have known (perhaps secretly) refer to his Lectures on Physics whenever they need a quick “refresher” on a topic or a summary of a long-forgotten area well beyond their specialty. Feynman was quirky, unique, eccentric, out-spoken, always informative, and always in command of his subject. He did not respect self aggrandizing appearances or mimetic behavior and showed this in an address he gave in 1974 at a commencement ceremony at CalTech, now recorded in essay form here and here.

In Cargo Cult Science Feynman lights on several pseudo-scientific pursuits that cause him concern: ESP, metal bending, mystical states, reflexology, and yes, education. An acknowledged master at both physics research and education, he says:

“A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. …So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.”

Feynman had a clear view of what was scientific, that is, what followed the scientific method and produced testable laws. Education did not, in Feynman’s mind, qualify as Science but was relegated to Cargo Cult Science – a mimetic form that played at being scientific but didn’t deliver the goods.

From the talk:

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.”

Feynman was not antagonistic towards the arts, he just didn’t think that a theory in a social science, for example, was equivalent to that in a physical science:

“But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work?”

More to the point, these “theories” can intimidate and confuse, and often don’t go much farther than advertisements in their ability to inform:

“The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will— including Wesson oil. So it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.”

The bottom line is honesty, integrity and awareness. Education, technical training, instructional design, and plain old teaching are complex fusions of art and science. They are complicated endeavors for which we have yet to figure out the laws. As Feynman would say, it’s like we are learning the laws of chess by watching games being played, and gradually deduce that certain pieces remain on the same color square and that certain odd behaviors between pieces (like castling) can occur in a corner of the board. Being unscientific doesn’t necessarily make an endeavor worthless, undesirable or even ineffective, but it does behoove us to be clear about its character. It’s important to be honest about the level of our understanding and know the limits of the technologies we employ, be they educational theories, pet approaches in the classroom, or PowerPoint.

Lecturing as most people know it probably goes back to before Gutenberg when the lecturer read what was a rare or perhaps only copy of an important book before an attentive (and interested) audience of students. This (primarily) broadcast method of disseminating information is still a mainstay in classrooms and presentation halls even though it is the bane of every media-enhanced post-literate learner. Furthermore, there are few signs that it will leave the educational scene any time soon.

Given that we will probably have to live with lectures, and in some cases make livings delivering them, honing lecturing skills can be a desirable and rewarding thing to do. As a teacher one wants to be successful in getting the message across. As a human one wants to cause as little pain to others as possible. With that in mind Rob Weir at Inside Higher Ed has some tips on how to deliver a better lecture. Some of the tips should be part of every train-the-trainer program:

“Bad lecturers violate nearly every rule of good communication. They never vary voice timbre or pitch. They either stare at their notes or ignore them altogether and ramble onto whatever topic comes to mind. They never make eye contact with their audience or use visual aids and handouts. Everything comes out at the same speed, and they never, ever show the slightest bit of life when discussing the very subject that supposedly excites them. Check for a pulse; if you can stay awake!”

Weir goes on to present a simple guideline for presenters to help keep the lecture focused and coherent:

“Step one to improving your lecture skills is to purge yourself of bad communication habits, but the rest of lecturing is a formula. Mix with enthusiasm and repeat the following:

• Stated Objective(s)
• A Plan
• Hook
• Body
• Repetition
• Summary
• Restated Objective(s)

State the objectives of the lecture for your sake and the sake of the audience. Let the audience know why the lecture is being given and what they should get from it. Keep the objectives clear and simple.

Weir suggests that lecturers employ a “Hook” when they speak. Many good lecturers are also great story tellers. This is where the Hook comes in:

“A time-tested way of engaging students is using a hook. Unveil a teaser, pose a question, tell a story, be provocative, invite brief brainstorming… any adult equivalent of ‘Once upon a time ….’ Frontloading wonderment helps keep an audience.”

Once the hook is set proceed to the Body of the talk:

“Once hooked, proceed to the body. Illustrate the thesis, don’t hammer it into submission. In days past I crammed as much detail as I could into lectures, which often led to confusion (and sore note-taking wrists). It’s better to say a lot about a little than a little about a lot. Delving into a few examples makes for a more cohesive narrative. Make sure that everything in your lecture relates to the objectives and isn’t just shoehorned in for the sake of being ‘comprehensive.’”

Take the time to present your main points from several angles. Remember we hold classes to help people who do not know the topics covered in the class or lecture to learn the things covered in the class or lecture. Try presenting the material from varying learning styles. Reinforce the main points and see if you can connect them to useful and relevant examples.

Finally, Weir suggests wrapping the talk with a summary of the important points and met objectives, a question and answer period, and a telltale mystery or two (to keep them hanging):

“… ask students to consider new ways to consider the material for the next class. Few things grab interest like a good mystery. If you dismiss class with a juicy conundrum to contemplate, you’ve got them primed for the next meeting.”

The University is doomed. At least from some accounts. Recent articles and blog posts claim that both educational consumers and producers have deep concerns over the state of its health and projected longevity. For example:

• The Impending Demise of the University
• End the University as We Know It
• Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?
• Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says
• The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
• Is College Obsolete?
• Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code he wrote for course

What seems clear from all this discussion is that life in electronic world has shifted the ways in which we learn, teach, work and relate to one another, and these ways are not reflected in the mainstream educational institutions that presently exist.

Naturally the roles played by the University are varied. David Wiley at “Hacking Education” by Union Square Ventures offered five basic components of a college or University:

1. Content provisioning
2. Research – conducted, archived, disseminated
3. Help provided to a student with a question on content
4. Social life
5. Issuing credentials

Note these might just as well be extended to the high school or the entire K-12 educational system as most points overlap secondary and college systems. A point of departure among students and critics (often unspoken) is that most or all of these essential services can be gotten from outside formal schools. Once upon a time there was a notion that schools centralized scarce information and formed a focus or concentration of knowledge that modern learners no longer regard as necessary or true. To a modern learner the “information is out there” all around us. What they need are tools and techniques for harnessing, interpreting and applying ubiquitous information.

The discussion about how education must or will change in light of the modern electronic environment goes back quite a few years. A casual glance at Marshall McLuhan’s writings on education will turn up articles and interviews from over forty years ago. One such article co-authored with George Leonard for LOOK Magazine (Feb. 21, 1967) is titled “The Future of Education: The Class of 1989.” With the exception of professorial tenure, McLuhan and Leonard address the same points that current writers wrestle with:

• Schools are preparing students for a world that no longer exists.
• Classrooms have not changed substantially over the last century.
• Mass education is a product of the mechanical age and the production line.
• Education was designed to slow and control the processes of personal growth and change.
• Students are furnished with rigid and isolated “bodies of knowledge.”
• Competition is the chief motive force in mass education.
• The lecture system, the “…least effective [mode] ever devised by man, served well enough in an age that demanded only a specified fragment of each human being’s whole abilities.”
• New technologies are not as central to tomorrow’s schooling as are new roles for student and teacher.
• There will no distinction between work and play as the student will be totally involved.
• The main work of the future will be education.
• The University will become an integral part of the community offering degrees of “membership” corresponding to varied levels of participation.

Given the essential and ongoing nature of education to the modern learner (or consumer) certain changes in approach can be expected:

• The learning process must be interactive or two-way.
• Learning styles must be taken into consideration.
• Standardized one-size-fits-all courses are out. Same for tests and evaluations.
• The University (read: curriculum or degree program) should not have walls.
• Learning should be asynchronous.
• Courses must be timely, relevant and engaging.
• Failure is part of the learning feedback loop; not an end of the process.
• Responsibility for learning will be shifted away from the student and towards the instructor or institution.
• Portfolios are more important than letter grades.
• Certifications are static and local and therefore have little lasting value.

There are several compelling reasons why we can expect consumers to prevail over the Universities and win these changes. First, students are coming to school steeped in electronic communications media and want to continue learning as they live, with full involvement. They will not accept that they have to “power down” to go to class. Educators will have to embrace new methods and techniques if they are to engage modern learners. Michael Wesch is a good example of a university teacher who accepted the challenge with his classes at Kansas State University only to write a new chapter in undergraduate pedagogy.

Secondly, education is expensive. The current average cost of a private university in the US is about $25,000.00 a year and is growing faster than inflation or medical care. Several generations of Americans have been to college since the Second World War and have grown to accept that in most cases a degree or two are essential to membership in the middle class. That said, these same middle class folks are also steeped in the most commercially oriented culture in history and are now becoming more consumer oriented concerning education. Part of this consumer oriented pressure will be in the direction of getting an education that fits their goals and lifestyles. Already we have seen the rise of non-traditional online Universities that focus on older students already in the workforce. No doubt others will rise to furnish the needs of other groups. If the Universities don’t change, students will vote with their feet (and checkbooks).

One other factor that is influencing modern students’ perception of the University is cultural, verging on mythological. Many top business/media/technology leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Michael Dell  do not have college degrees. This sends a powerful, if silent, message to many. Consider the story of Rob Kalin at “Hacking Education” mentioned above:

“I graduated high school with a D minus average. …My guidance counselor said ‘drop out of high school, you’ll have an easier time getting into college if you just get a GED.’ I [decided] to graduate with this D minus and see what it does for me. I didn’t get into any accredited school . I got into a diploma program in an art school in Boston, and it was near MIT. … I used the art school to make a fake ID to go to MIT. Someone said [college is] expensive. I said no, it’s free, you just won’t get credit for it.”

“Today, no one is going to ask Rob for his college transcript. His credentials are the companies he has created.”

One of my pet rants is that good design matter, even for training materials. Well designed tools don’t just delight the eye they function better, adding efficiency to their purpose. The problem, however, is that design is often taken as extraneous and unnecessary by development managers, instructional designers and other business people who see it as “eye candy.”

Psychologist and author Donald Norman has a post on this issue and attempts to remedy the situation at Northwestern University:

Terry Winograd of Stanford’s computer science department and d.school wrote a very nice description of our new Design + Operations MMM program at the Kellogg School of Business and Northwestern Engineering. That article is available in Interactions, the magazine for Human Computer Interaction professionals.

In Winograd’s words:

The essence of successful interactive products is not just the interaction an end user has with the product, but with the whole range of operations that make that interaction work.

Norman goes on to say that  Jimmy Guterman at O’Reilly Radar Group reviews the program in a post titled “Teaching Design to Business People.” A copy of the Winograd article in PDF format can be gotten here:  p44-winograd.

Educational Origami is a wiki site dedicated to bringing the classroom into the 21st Century. It’s a bit “busy” but well worth the effort combing through its many winding links and pages. One of the main features of the site is the update of Bloom’s Taxonomy for the modern electronic learner.

Diagram of Bloom's Taxonomy

Other notable topics include: the 21st Century Teacher, the 21 Century Learner, ITC and Learning Style, and Web 2.0 Tools and Resources.

I am a big fan of Media Literacy, not only because it helps as a consumer of media but also because it aids in the production of efficient communications. If you know the sensory bias of medium you can better match it to an application.

Not surprisingly educators and trainers have become more aware of the varieties of media experiences in which their students routinely participate and learn through in their daily lives. The degree to which average people in North America acquire information through non-literate media can be shockingly high, leading many to conclude that the benchmark of phonetic literacy as the leading indicator of what it means to be literate may have to be augmented for the post-literate age we live in.

The Media Awareness Network is a good resource for parents and educators looking to manage and promote media literacy. One of their working definitions of media literacy is:

Media literacy is the ability to sift through and analyze the messages that inform, entertain and sell to us every day. It’s the ability to bring critical thinking skills to bear on all media— from music videos and Web environments to product placement in films and virtual displays on NHL hockey boards. It’s about asking pertinent questions about what’s there, and noticing what’s not there. And it’s the instinct to question what lies behind media productions— the motives, the money, the values and the ownership— and to be aware of how these factors influence content.

Media education encourages a probing approach to the world of media: Who is this message intended for? Who wants to reach this audience, and why? From whose perspective is this story told? Whose voices are heard, and whose are absent? What strategies does this message use to get my attention and make me feel included?

In our world of multi-tasking, commercialism, globalization and interactivity, media education isn’t about having the right answers—it’s about asking the right questions. The result is lifelong empowerment of the learner and citizen.

The Ontario Public School Board has a note on their web site about what they see as the emerging issues surrounding the new media and the future of the classroom. In it they mention:

“Today’s students are leaders in the use of technology and we know they want their learning experiences in school to reflect this,” said Colleen Schenk, president of OPSBA. “Students want to take the technology they use in their daily lives and integrate it with how they learn. They want their learning clearly connected to the world beyond the school.”

They go on to say:

Many students feel, however, that when they come into school they have to “power down” to fit into an environment that offers fewer options for learning than are available in the life they live outside of the school. This can erode students’ perceptions of the relevance of education as they experience it in many schools today. At the same time, students need the guidance and leadership of their teachers in judging the authenticity and worth of the information so readily available to them.

What seems clear is that instructional designers and trainers need to do several things to further the use of media in continuing education:

1. Educate learners about the biases and limitations of  media.
2. Show participants how to use new media for learning.
3. Develop the skills to master and employ new media in training programs so that participants want to take part in the training and get value from it.
   

PowerPoint slides and printed Student Guides alone are no longer sufficient. We should not be asking our students to “power down” to come to class. We need recognize that for the most part people today are learning all the time and we must work to make it easier and more efficient when they come to us for the formal experience. Far too often the opposite is the case.

Maybe it’s because I like spend so much time in the kitchen that I often find myself relating what happens in the classroom to the kitchen. It seems natural enough. Both venues are social situations with strong ties to our cultural pasts. Both involve some story telling (well, maybe that’s more a comment on my family and friends), and require that raw materials be converted to more digestible forms. Other parallels between food and learning stand out as well. For instance:

Time to Eat Does Not Equal Time to Prepare.

Often a meal, like a lecture or presentation, can take a week to prepare and minutes to consume. This is apt to be more gratifying to the teacher than to the serious chef, but in either case the time and trouble to the finished product may go unnoticed or unconsidered. Development managers usually have some conversion factors at hand for how many hours go into making an hour of instruction. (Does anybody know where these numbers come from and whether they are accurate or, more to the point, self fulfilling?) I don’t think that I’ve ever been asked how long it took to develop a presentation (or make a lasagna) and it really doesn’t matter. The object of the endeavor is really about something else and any good teacher (or cook) is  generally pleased when the lesson (or the lasagna) is gobbled up with wild abandon and the student (or diner) returns for seconds and thirds.

Timing Matters.

A common feature on the training development landscape are instructional designers who treat course contents like ingredients, but with little or no concern for quantity or treatment. Frankly, I think it might come from the fact that many people who design training never actually teach. An example goes something like this: “We need to teach the seven layer OSI Model for TCP/IP. Period.” To my ear this is like saying “We need onion.” It doesn’t specify how much onion or how we should treat the onion, just that we need onion. Do we sauté the onion until it’s translucent, nicely browned or darkly caramelized? When do we add it? Even a little time in front of a class will teach you that when a topic is brought up for discussion and how long is spent on it are crucial to establishing how engaging the learning process is. The successful instructional designer will know the audience well enough to know how much for how long. There is always a temptation to belabor points because you think they are important (or rigorous) or perhaps because they are your favorite topics and make you sound impressive. Don’t do it! I love garlic, lemon and peppers but I have to admit that they are sometimes best used as condiments and might not be palatable when eaten raw or overcooked.

Cook for All the Senses.

In the kitchen an inspired cook will try to offer a balanced palette of sensory experiences to the diner. That is, a dish will include an interesting mixture or color, texture, aroma and flavors.

The instructional designer or instructor is faced with a similar challenge. Cooking for all the senses is akin to “design for all learning styles.” Just as engaging all or most senses in a dish tends to broaden the appeal of the dish and encourage more sensory involvement, so teaching to multiple learning styles can stimulate a more complete involvement by the learner and allow more people of different types to benefit from the training. It is for this reason that whenever possible ideas should be “pitched” to varied learning styles even though in corporate or professional training the  bias of the audience may be pronounced.

Use Quality Ingredients.

I have recently started to use more organic foods in cooking, not because I am a health freak but because I’ve noticed an improvement in taste. Really great ingredients are a little more expensive and generally a little harder to find, but all things considered they make a distinct improvement. Similarly, in producing training materials use the best components and designs that time and money can bear. Look for or create better, clearer, more apt graphics. Produce and edit audio to  make it clearer and easier to listen to. Design pages to flow and present information in a way that is easy on the eye. Select colors and fonts to illustrate the message and facilitate the learning process.

In many cases you will suffer the slings and arrows of outraged instructional designers and managers who will chide you for spending too much time (and money) on “eye candy” that “doesn’t really aid the learning process.” Don’t give in. Design does matter. Well designed tools assist in their application. They make the job easier. Besides being more efficient at communicating the points of the instruction, top-notch design materials tell  users (the students) that they matter, that the endeavor is worthwhile, and that the content (the message) is important. A lot is communicated non-verbally in a training situation. Instructional designers, trainers, and production staff need to maintain high standards for the quality of their work even if it means learning new production skills (God forbid!) or going to other people for help. Be careful: “You are what you eat” might well be a metaphor for the learning process.

Introduce new (strange) foods in the company of old (familiar) ones.

I’ve noticed that whenever you want to introduce a reluctant diner to a new (and possibly odd) food, it’s a good idea to present the new food in the company of one or two familiar ones. The familiar foods seem to defuse the danger of the new food and lower the perceived risk. The same seems to be true of ideas. Difficult to grasp nonintuitive concepts are easier to get across when they are prefaced (or surrounded) by already-known or easier to accept notions. This isn’t just linearly building a logical path to a new idea. It’s more akin to a scaffold that gets you to the new idea. Consider an example: the square root of minus one (or “i” in mathematics).

Usually by the time a person gets to wrestling with the square root of negative one (i), the notion of a “negative” number is pretty well accepted and established. A common representation of a negative number is direction, that is, the sign of the number refers to whether a transaction moves positively, increasing in value, or negatively, decreasing in value, along the number line. The notion of debt is often used in this context as an example of the utility of negative numbers in real life even though the physical reality of negative numbers might be suspect.

Once negative numbers are comfortably in place the imaginary number  “i” can enter the stage. Equated to the square root of -1 an immediate revulsion is almost universally present. What two transactions/operations can be undertaken to yield -1? As it turns out, just as the sign of the number implies direction the relationship that describes x•x=-1 is rotation. Kalid Azad at BetterExplained.com has a nice discussion and illustration showing this.

Notice how in the development of the explanation to “What’s the meaning of the square root of minus one?” it is the relationship between ideas that is key. Moving to a new and difficult concept through an old and comfortable one makes the job a lot easier and probably results in a more memorable experience as well for the learner. Getting back to food for a moment, is this why people who serve insects often cover them in chocolate?