How to teach without teaching, the latest challenge in education

Strategies based on experiential learning involve the five senses

In a globalized world, the ability to acquire knowledge is increasingly diverse and within everyone’s reach, resulting in new and bigger challenges for developing talent.

Talent development professionals should use new technologies to pursue innovative strategies that ensure the people who report to us understand the importance of the matters affecting our organization.

How to choose the right path among all the trends?

We frequently forget a fundamental and basic principle when dealing with people: they should not be grouped together. Believing that training strategies will have an identical impact on everyone involved is like regressing to the stimulus-response theory. Over time, talent professionals have discovered that educating involves more than just standing in front of a group and reading slides.

Training and conveying knowledge is the ability for the message we share in sessions, using any medium or platform, to become a seed that awakens curiosity and a desire to discover and continue learning more about the topic.

Another aspect to consider is the audience. According to a Microsoft Corp study, the attention span of humans has dropped from 12 to 8 seconds in the past 6 years. In other words, unless you are able to grab the audience’s attention very quickly, they will lose interest and their brains will automatically detect it as “useless information.”

How to learn in the new era?

The answer is simple: teach without teaching. The best way to keep their attention and awaken their curiosity is by devising strategies focused on learning through experiences and that drive people to use their five senses to learn.

NetPartner states that the 70/20/10 model has helped companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola and HP because it is based on the idea that 70% of professional learning is from experience, 20% through conversations and feedback, and 10% from structured courses.

The importance of having a learning methodology based on experiences guarantees attention and interest. This is because in this model, mechanisms of the human reptilian brain come into play, such as interactions and kinesthetics (movement).

Learning by stepping into new roles, forming part of other departments or meeting with specialized professionals are some of the ways that collaborators not only learn, but also give importance to the knowledge acquired.

In this day and age, we are familiar with models such as gamification, a strategy covered in previous articles along with some of our success stories. Gamification helps retain knowledge and improves concentration, effort and loyalty, among other values, through play. This type of methodology shows that technology goes hand in hand with learning.

An experiential education plan combined with a solid gamification model will help establish a sphere of learning that encourages creation, retention and knowledge sharing.