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Ready or Not?: Why Some Students Are More Ready to Learn Than Others
As a subject matter expert, you are likely excited to teach new students about your product. It can be frustrating, though, to find that some are not as eager to learn as you are to teach. It can also be overwhelming when they are overly enthusiastic about learning and you can’t teach them fast enough.
Why is it that some students are more primed and ready to learn than others? How can you say something to two equally bright students and it will change one’s behavior and knowledge and have no effect on the other? It is important to understand what drives a student’s readiness to learn and what you can do to influence them.
There are, of course, external influences that are beyond your control. Any number of external influences can make learning challenging, even for bright students. Emotional or physical stress can be a barrier to learning. Lack of sleep, for example, may make learning difficult for a student. While you should make every effort to schedule the classes to reduce this problem, the reality is that you have little control over your students’ sleep habits. You will have even less control over the emotional stress that may be hindering their learning.
The Four Principles of Learner‐Readiness
Being aware of your students’ physical and emotional state is important. A good instructor will adjust schedules and even learning requirements accordingly. However, your concern is primarily with what you can either control or influence. There are four principles that must be true of a student if he or she is going to learn in your class. A student who meets all four of these requirements will learn best, while one who is missing one or more will struggle to internalize the learning. The four learner‐readiness principles are that learners must recognize the need for learning, they must take responsibility for their learning, they must be able to relate it to past experiences, and they must be ready to apply the learning.
They Must Recognize the Need for Learning
Because learning is personal, the motivation to learn is personal. One of the questions students always ask in any structured learning environment is “So what?” They probably don’t vocalize the question, but they want to know how the learning will benefit them.
In a typical product training class, you will have some students who are there because they want to learn. Those students have already answered the “so what” question for themselves. Anyone who wants to learn something has an idea of how it is going to benefit them to do so. You may also have students who have yet to answer that question. It is important to help them do that as soon as possible.
There are many ways to determine if your students have answered that question or not. One way is simply to ask. At the beginning of a class, ask students to state one thing they hope to get out of the class. Ask them why they are attending the class or what they hope to do better after the class. Ask for specific answers. If you get the typical “to get a better understanding of your product” answer, try to dig a little deeper. Ask how that “better understanding” is going to help them or their company. Doing this very early on is important, since the student must answer this question before learning that will last can begin.
What if Their Reason for Learning Is Wrong?
Sometimes as you’re asking that question, you’ll get someone with an obvious misunderstanding about what your product does or how it will be beneficial to them. Depending on the circumstances, this can get a little tricky to navigate, since you don’t want to embarrass a student in front of the class. You want to minimize their misunderstanding as much as possible and correct it as soon as you can, preferably in private during one of the first breaks.
If your product is particularly innovative or new to the market, it is more susceptible to a misunderstanding of its benefits early on. Asking leading questions in these circumstances can be helpful to eliminate public misunderstandings. Another way is to encourage some type of pre‐learning before class begins. A short video or quick guide can help students answer the “so what” question before coming to class.
They Must Take Responsibility for Their Learning
The second principle of learner‐readiness is that the student must be willing and ready to take responsibility for their learning. Understanding is earned. Learners must own their learning. Challenge your students to review the stated objectives and choose one that is the most important to them—which one they want to be certain to learn during the class. This not only helps them recognize their need for training but also helps them to take responsibility for it as well.
But not all students understand that they must take ownership of their own learning in order to change behavior through education. Most assume that they will learn proportionately to the value of the content or the ability of the instructor to teach it. Both are, of course, important. Adding the third pillar of personal responsibility is often something they aren’t used to hearing in a corporate or technical learning environment and has the potential to make a significant difference in your class.
Questions Demonstrate Learning
One way to encourage responsible learning is to teach your students how to ask questions while they are learning. Don’t wait until the end of a dialogue to ask questions. Students often won’t ask questions then, unless the question is about something you covered toward the end of your presentation. If you encourage asking questions throughout the class, it will help increase their level of responsibility.
The right reason to ask questions needs to be encouraged as well. There are many students who believe questions are merely the way they can clarify something they didn’t understand. If that is their understanding, then the need to ask questions is a result of one of two options: either the instructor didn’t explain it well, or the student was the only one unable to absorb the information the instructor gave.
In order to avoid looking unintelligent, many students will assume that the instructor didn’t explain the concept well. That allows them to ask the question without looking ignorant in front of their classmates. Those students usually ask for clarification for everyone. They are often not satisfied unless you explain the entire concept in a new and fresh way, which can take significant time.
Asking questions, however, is really a tool that learners use to build new information on previous experiences and learning. Since all previous learning and experiences are unique, it has nothing to do with intelligence and may have little to do with your explanation. Good questions have everything to do with taking ownership of the learning.
Encourage your students to ask questions. Create a positive motive for asking questions by changing it from lack of intelligence to a desire for more intelligence. Make it a positive experience when they do ask a question. Thank them for helping to clarify something for everyone and make sure they understand it before you proceed with something else. In exceptional cases, when it is obvious that they don’t have the experience to use as a foundation for new learning, ask for time outside of the classroom to help them individually. That is the spirit of a great instructor.
The Instructor’s Responsibility
While students must take ownership of their learning, instructors have a responsibility to help the students learn. When a sports team loses a closely contended game, it can be difficult to determine if the failure to win should rest on the coach’s shoulders or on the players’. Often it is both. While the players must execute and take ownership of it happening, the coach is responsible to make it possible.
The same is true in the learning environment. You are a coach. Your main job is to provide them the right opportunity or environment in which to learn. You cannot learn for them, but you are just as much a winner as they are when they do. Like a coach, you need to be continuously evaluating your students, perhaps even adjusting your strategy to make sure a change in behavior actually occurs. Stop teaching new things if the previous concepts haven’t been learned yet. There is no value in moving forward until your students are ready to learn.
They Must Relate It to Their Experience
Since all learning is a process of building on previous learning and experiences, you cannot simply provide facts and expect students to retain any new learning if they can’t relate it to their past knowledge. Students must be able to relate the new learning to learning they have already acquired or experienced.
One of the best ways for subject matter experts to help students relate to the learning is to relate it to their own experience. Many experts think that stories and anecdotes are time‐wasters that have no real learning purpose. When used correctly, however, they can have a powerful influence on facilitating learning.
Tips on using personal experiences:
- Tell about your own learning experiences. When you tell a story about your past learning experiences make sure it is just that—about learning. Never tell a story to try to impress your students with how well you used your knowledge in a particular circumstance. That may boost your ego, but it will have little effect on their learning. Instead, tell about when you learned or applied the concept and what you learned from it.
- Make yourself vulnerable. Don’t pretend to have always been a natural if you were (or are) not. Tell them about mistakes you have made and what you learned from them. Being vulnerable will not diminish your students’ respect for you, but that is not your main concern anyway. Your main concern is for them to learn. When they sense that you are trying to help them avoid some of the same mistakes you have made, they will be grateful for your leadership.
- Use recent examples. If possible, use examples that are fresh and recent. It demonstrates that the learning never ends, even with an expert.
- Keep your examples relevant. If there is not a good objective for telling the story, don’t tell it. Recounting experiences can be a powerful way to help students learn, but as soon as it becomes irrelevant, it dilutes all future stories you may want to tell.
- Keep your examples short. Yes. That short.
- Know your audience. Unlike your learning objectives or your outline, you can have multiple examples and use different ones every time you teach. You should know your audience well enough to know what will most benefit them. Be culturally and educationally sensitive. Emphasize their learning, not your amazing experience.
- Listen to their stories. One of the hardest things for an instructor to do is to encourage others to tell about their learning experiences. It can be a challenge to keep them relevant, recent, and short, but when done well it can be a great learning experience for everyone. Never try to compete with their story. Instead, be grateful for the learning experience. Demonstrate what you can learn from their experiences to the class. This will help them see how to take another person’s learning experience (including yours) and apply it to their own circumstances. Hearing stories from multiple sources increases the probability of being able to relate the learning to their own situation.
They Must Be Ready to Apply It
Another question students are subconsciously asking themselves when they come to class is, “When am I going to need this?” It is the facilitator’s job to get them ready to apply their learning, and students get ready faster when they believe they need to apply the learning soon.
The principle of proximity to the need is what makes on‐demand training so powerful. The immediate need is what makes it effective. My son and I recently installed a new sound system in his car. We watched several YouTube videos prior to starting the project and several more when we ran into issues putting the dashboard back together. Those videos, and many others, proved very helpful when I needed information. However, if I just sat down to watch the videos for entertainment purposes, I likely would not learn much from them. Not having the immediate need for the learning removes the value almost completely.
The same is true of your learning. If they don’t ever think they’ll use it, they are likely to learn very little. Even knowing they will use it but not having a specific need in the near future puts them at a significant disadvantage. If your students know the need, build on it. If they don’t, you need to create it.
One of the values of hands‐on training is that it creates that need. When students know that they are going to have to perform the task you are teaching them, they will be more eager to learn it. This is more than just a desire to pass a test or save face in front of the rest of the class. This is an actual learning principle. If you show a student how to do something just in case they ever need to do it, and then you show them how to do something because they are going to do it, they will always learn better in the second scenario.
Conclusion
Product solution training can mean teaching a wide range of students, from a disinterested employee to a highly engaged consumer. It can be challenging when one student learns quickly and is absorbing the learning as fast as you can teach it, while another one is being left behind. The first thing you can do as an instructor is to understand the reasons why this happens. The second thing you can do is find ways to influence your students. If he or she isn’t ready to learn, you’re not ready to teach. Don’t begin proficiency training without preparing them first.
Most students come into a technical training class with an obvious understanding of their need for the training. If they don’t, it is wise to offer short presentations that focus on the need to learn more and how that will help the student. You can make them part of your hands‐on training, or you can deliver them as a prerequisite learning module.
Your influence over a student’s readiness to apply the learning, their efforts to take responsibility for their learning, and their ability to relate it to their own experiences will vary depending on your audience and the solution you are teaching. You can influence all of them by engaging your students in the learning experience. As you engage them in learning exercises, you will be encouraging them to take responsibility for their learning. As you engage them in questions and conversations, you will be helping them to relate to what you are teaching them. As you engage them in hands‐on labs, you will be creating a readiness to apply it, even in the classroom.
Your students’ readiness to learn is influenced by a DO versus KNOW philosophy of learning. Not only do adults learn best when they are doing, but also they are most motivated to learn when they are doing. Get your students motivated to learn and they will be easy to teach.
Making It Practical
Perhaps the most important job of any instructor is to motivate his or her students to learn. Take some time to reflect on the four learner‐readiness principles: (i) students must recognize the need for learning, (ii) students must take responsibility for their learning, (iii) students must relate the learning to their previous experiences, and (iv) students must be ready to apply it.
- Which do you feel you have the least control of?
- How are you going to change that in your next class?
- What is one way to get your students to take responsibility of their learning?
Review of Part One: The Foundation of Hands‐On Learning
- What is one thing from Chapters 1 to 4 that you will apply the next time you teach?