A GOOD WAY OF TEACHING

I’m not a teacher by profession, but I’ve been hired very recently by my previous company to train their newly hires. They’ve trusted me enough to handle this task even though this was my very first job as a trainer. They’ve given me a month’s time frame, but I’ve finished the training in just two weeks, half the time they’ve set for me. They were amazed by the progress I’ve made, and the progress of the trainees, their adaptation to a new work environment. This was the first time that this had happened because prior to this, trainings were usually conducted in a two-month period.

I’ve set up a milestone. I’ve required my trainees to meet a 90% performance on their first week and a 95% performance on their second week, and they must maintain that 95% performance all the way through their “graduation”, as I might say, because that is the standard rating once they’re in production. And they’ve achieved it. Well, not all of them, there were two who had failed to meet the standards I’ve set, and they were removed from the training and were not hired.

Well, you know, I’ve discovered that one of those things that we need to get rid off and kind of rub off to the side in a pretty big hurry is “repetition”, the father of learning as they say. Well, not so. You don’t repeat something over and over and expect someone to get it. They’ll get it but, you see, it doesn’t turn on switches in the brain.

A long time ago, you might recall that there was a fellow who is in education. His name was Aristotle. You probably heard of him. He had a student called Cicero. And Cicero discovered a marvelous way of teaching; it was called “loci”. And this is what loci says, “I can place in this room, the one you’re in, the one I’m in, a bunch of information, and if I can close my eyes and see that room, I can recall that information anytime I want to. You’re thinking, “Just a little memory trick.” No. I’m telling you, it’s a concrete way to anchor memory without repetition and without doing something over and over. So this is the method I’ve used for my trainees, and it worked! You see, “learning is the true application of what we know”.

Success can be achieved, but we have to be innovational. We have to ask ourselves, “What works? Don’t pay me extra to make it work, just pay me to do a good job.” Ask that magic question because I have discovered that when we ask questions, we get wonderful, wonderful answers. And it didn’t have to be a question we ask over and over, or a ritual, or something that is learned about rote memorization. The first thing we should do to be active learners and keep active learning in our life is we have to be active learners. We have to move. We have to exercise our bodies. And we have to laugh.