ACCELERATED LEARNING IS NEITHER A MYTH NOR A PASSING FAD. IT HAS BEEN KNOWN TO IMPROVE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LEARNING BY UP TO 300%* AND CUT DOWN TRAINER PREPARATION TIME BY 30%**
*Donald Schuster, Professor of Psychology Iowa State University
** Debbie Meddins, L&D Manager Atos, UK
ACCELERATED LEARNING – WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?
Accelerated learning can be described as an accumulated wisdom. Dozens of universities, research psychologists and professional educators have contributed to produce this way of presenting new information. People like Dr. Georgi Lozanov, Roger Sperry and Robert Ornstein have been key contributors, but also NLP researchers such as James Grinder have had their input.
There are 5 broad areas or “secrets” to accelerated learning, that Krys shared in a recent article called “Get up to speed” that appeared in the Training Journal in 2016. An earlier one in the Training Journal in January 2013 called “Quick off the mark introduced these. You can even find out “50 ways to Accelerate Learning” in Krys’s iBook
THE BENEFITS
In order to accelerate learning through an organisation, stakeholders need to be engaged and line managers need to support their learners to imbed the learning. The organisation will benefit because:
Learning will be geared towards improving capability and real results
The learning will be geared towards the business not the content or subject matter
Application and retention of the learning will be greater
Facilitators can design the learning faster than using the traditional “instructional design” route
Facilitators will be excited about delivering learning
Accelerated learning, taps into a natural or “brain friendly” way of learning. It uses a variety of tools and techniques to cumulatively increase retention of the learning. Using accelerated learning techniques, you can expect your people to:
Be more motivated to learn more
Retain information for longer
Have retained more information in a shorter time
Be prepared for learning before they enter the classroom
Continue learning after any workshop
Learn in a variety of ways, not just by training
HOW TO USE ACCELERATED LEARNING
Some people may think that once they have “bought into” the accelerated learning they will need to re-write all of the training materials. What we often advice, to start with, is an quick audit of any training objectives before each course or workshop is run, to see if the objectives are focused towards the business. If they are not, these can be tweaked to ensure tangible results.
If you are “accelerating” your workshops, just making the shift from being a trainer to a facilitator, can help determine the tweaks you can implement. I love Sharon Bowman’s book “Brain Science to make Training Stick” and her 6 simple “trumps” that help to adapt existing workshops easily.
Watch this short video to see her trumps!