WEBVTT
00:02.935 --> 00:08.298
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you're in the right place.
00:08.819 --> 00:09.879
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Celisa Steele.
00:10.300 --> 00:14.062
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Jeff Cobb, and this is the leading learning podcast.
00:16.770 --> 00:18.532
[SPEAKER_01]: Learning isn't just content.
00:18.892 --> 00:26.879
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a neurobiological process, but according to our guest, the way most workplace learning is designed doesn't recognize that reality.
00:27.479 --> 00:41.732
[SPEAKER_03]: Our guest in this episode, number 480, is Dr. Tessa Forshaw, cognitive scientist and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies how people work, learn, and create in the flow of their work.
00:42.432 --> 00:59.558
[SPEAKER_01]: In our conversation, Tessa walks through five principles grounded in science, from the fact that learning is biological and social to the importance of situated learning, productive effort and transfer, and she explains what each principle means for how learning experiences should be designed.
01:00.378 --> 01:13.099
[SPEAKER_03]: New and Tesla also explore why learning businesses may have some surprising advantages when it comes to applying these principles and where to focus if you want your programs to make a real difference in how learners perform on the job.
01:13.528 --> 01:25.092
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and Tessa makes a strong case for meta cognition as the single most impactful thing you can build into any learning program to improve retention, durability, and transfer.
01:25.672 --> 01:38.556
[SPEAKER_03]: If you design the liver or lead learning experiences and you want to better align what you do with what the science actually tells us about how adults learn, then this conversation with Dr. Tessa Forshaw is for you.
01:44.966 --> 01:50.289
[SPEAKER_02]: You're the faculty chair of the workforce and workplace concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
01:50.309 --> 01:54.231
[SPEAKER_02]: You're also directing the workforce learning and innovation initiative.
01:54.672 --> 01:58.794
[SPEAKER_02]: So maybe tell us a little bit about that initiative and your role with it.
01:59.354 --> 02:00.535
[SPEAKER_00]: Education skills have.
02:00.815 --> 02:16.063
[SPEAKER_00]: spent decades studying how people learn and there's an incredible amount of expertise at HGSE amongst my colleagues who studied education and learning for such a long time, but rarely has that expertise being pointed at workforce learning.
02:16.543 --> 02:25.686
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not like you turn 18 and don't continue into a university and then magically your brain learns differently and all the principles changed.
02:26.427 --> 02:27.167
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not true.
02:28.007 --> 02:41.312
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this initiative is really focused on how to we make sure that we're extending and applying all the science that we know about how people learn that is deeply embedding HSC into this very high priority population.
02:41.892 --> 02:44.795
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are three streams associated with the program.
02:45.235 --> 02:52.222
[SPEAKER_00]: The first is this idea of preparing so a concentration in the Master's Program in Workforce and Workplace Learning.
02:52.242 --> 02:55.625
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like a major for students in the Master's Program.
02:56.365 --> 03:01.290
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really about how do we prepare the next generation of Workforce Learning Leaders.
03:01.850 --> 03:04.493
[SPEAKER_00]: The second component is what we're calling E-Clip.
03:05.013 --> 03:09.237
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's focused on professional certificates in workforce and workplace learning.
03:09.938 --> 03:15.864
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we've recently did the first cohort of that earlier in the year, we have another one coming up in July.
03:15.884 --> 03:21.970
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the, again, the first type of workforce learning focus certificate at HDSC.
03:22.010 --> 03:23.332
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's very exciting.
03:23.912 --> 03:40.456
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the third component of the initiative is what we call discover and that's really about applied research partnerships with organizations where we partner with them to do typically design-based research in real organizations in real contexts, focused around real problems of practice.
03:40.936 --> 03:47.018
[SPEAKER_00]: We apply rigid methodologies to really uncover what's working, what's not, and then share that with the field.
03:48.940 --> 03:56.966
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've read that you've asserted that workforce learning still doesn't really match what we know about how people learn.
03:57.586 --> 04:12.356
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would love to hear what you see as some of the biggest mismatches between that science of learning and what we know and then the way that adult workers are commonly taught or the way we design learning for those adult workers.
04:13.554 --> 04:15.795
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that that's what you've gleaned from my work.
04:15.815 --> 04:23.779
[SPEAKER_00]: They definitely think that when they talk to a lot of learning leaders, learning is often discussed as content delivery.
04:24.200 --> 04:32.224
[SPEAKER_00]: So they will talk about learning as the content that is being created or the event that is being held.
04:32.844 --> 04:37.686
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's really important that we remember that learning isn't content.
04:38.027 --> 04:40.108
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning is a neurobiological process.
04:40.848 --> 04:51.753
[SPEAKER_00]: and that process is influenced by chemicals in our brain and hormones in our body that are shaped by the environment and the context that we sit within.
04:52.493 --> 05:01.657
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when we sort of understand learning in that lens, it both opens up where learning can happen and what it looks like, but it also gives
05:08.420 --> 05:17.426
[SPEAKER_00]: create and foster those positive neurochemicals and hormones to inside learning and sort of alleviate the ones that don't.
05:17.666 --> 05:27.032
[SPEAKER_00]: And we put that responsibility on L&D teams or on organizations providing learning experiences in a way that it hasn't typically been considered before.
05:27.823 --> 05:41.913
[SPEAKER_02]: You were saying before we got started that one of the things that you talk about in the certificate are five principles for sort of the future of workplace learning so maybe could you just sort of outline and briefly explain those those five principles.
05:43.241 --> 05:44.482
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I absolutely can.
05:44.502 --> 05:49.846
[SPEAKER_00]: So the five principles that we talk about start with this idea of learning is biological.
05:50.407 --> 05:57.893
[SPEAKER_00]: So we understand that sort of behavior change comes from changes in the mind, which comes from changes in the brain, which comes from changes in the cell.
06:03.717 --> 06:22.697
[SPEAKER_00]: neuroplasticity and so there's a lot of there's a lot of fake going on there but there is a seed of truth or a grain of truth and that is that neuroplasticity is the foundation of learning the ability for us to create a neural pathway between two neurons is the foundation of all learning.
06:23.237 --> 06:47.022
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we understand that their cell influences, the brain, which influences the mind, which influences behavior, that helps us think about how we can create learning in organizations, especially because so many workplaces are full of things that make that biological process harder, therefore love cortisol, therefore love cognitive overload, therefore of constant context
06:51.523 --> 06:56.885
[SPEAKER_00]: when stress takes over and your brain doesn't operate at its peak performance anymore.
06:57.325 --> 07:14.610
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think when we understand learning is biological we can also start to understand that learning at work is actually very rarely about effort or attention and it's much more about the conditions in our bodies and our environments that are blocking this cellular change from happening.
07:14.950 --> 07:16.231
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's sort of one component.
07:16.431 --> 07:19.093
[SPEAKER_00]: The next principle is that learning is social.
07:19.533 --> 07:32.443
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we know from decades of research on expertise development and the nature of learning that people become experts by being around people who are further along in that area of expertise.
07:33.003 --> 07:47.713
[SPEAKER_00]: So having people more experienced others share mental models, expose their reasoning to you, and really I think faster that sort of traditional romantic idea of a apprenticeship that we have from hundreds of years ago.
07:48.054 --> 07:52.037
[SPEAKER_00]: So learning is very social and it happens in a relationship with others.
07:52.877 --> 08:07.936
[SPEAKER_00]: The third principle that learning is situated, and so this is really focused on the idea that pulling people out of work to go and learn is a really tough design choice because that the brain encodes skills along with the context.
08:08.056 --> 08:09.237
[SPEAKER_00]: in which they are learned in.
08:09.257 --> 08:25.487
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of people don't realize that our environment actually plays a huge role in the retrieval of learning because we associate different knowledge and skills practices to the physical environment in which we learn them.
08:25.887 --> 08:30.550
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then when we're in those environments, they can help us cure it forward.
08:31.031 --> 08:52.525
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if we learn something in and abstracted classroom on a beautiful L&D center, that sort of offers a campus, and then we're supposed to go back and apply it on a factory floor, that's going to be very hard because the environment isn't queuing that knowledge that we've learned to be brought forward and those retrieval pathways aren't yet strong,
08:55.167 --> 08:57.249
[SPEAKER_00]: the fourth principle is that learning takes effort.
08:57.809 --> 09:05.795
[SPEAKER_00]: So we talked a little bit about learning being a biological process and that they're being the creation of a pathway between 10 neurons.
09:06.276 --> 09:14.922
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you could imagine for me like a bank of sand and you have a stick at either end and you want to create a pathway between the two of them at stays.
09:15.823 --> 09:19.366
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to really dig into the stand and put some effort in there.
09:19.426 --> 09:20.786
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the same in your mind.
09:20.826 --> 09:24.169
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually need effort to forge that pathway.
09:24.189 --> 09:25.329
[SPEAKER_00]: So learning takes effort.
09:25.750 --> 09:32.835
[SPEAKER_00]: So being easy and just like super fun isn't necessarily what we're going for.
09:32.875 --> 09:36.357
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going for experiences that provide opportunities for effort.
09:37.137 --> 09:41.140
[SPEAKER_00]: And then finally that learning has to transfer so that the point of
09:45.683 --> 10:00.609
[SPEAKER_00]: And sort of that means that when we're especially today, where those future projects are often ambiguous and we don't know how they're going to change, that means that when we think about learning, we have to think about designing opportunities to expansively frame all of the different ways things could be applied.
10:00.989 --> 10:07.151
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, that's part of helping that sort of encoding it in a way that's much easier for us to retrieve at that moment and meet.
10:07.311 --> 10:08.652
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a five principles.
10:11.141 --> 10:16.824
[SPEAKER_02]: As I've shared with you, most of our listeners work in what we call learning businesses.
10:17.044 --> 10:19.946
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they are all about trying to support those learners.
10:20.106 --> 10:24.449
[SPEAKER_02]: And they want to help them improve on the job at work as professionals.
10:24.869 --> 10:30.472
[SPEAKER_02]: But they don't tend to have that sort of direct access to their learners on the job.
10:30.973 --> 10:34.315
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm just wondering how these principles might inform
10:35.255 --> 10:58.467
[SPEAKER_02]: how folks like that who have a little bit of a, you know, sort of a bit of a distance between them and some of their learners in a way or at least their learners workplaces, how might those principles inform how they think about building courses, creating programs, other learning experiences, are some of those principles more or less relevant when thinking about kind of learning businesses
11:00.928 --> 11:02.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a great question.
11:02.748 --> 11:08.049
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the first version of a program, we had some people from learning businesses as you described them.
11:08.690 --> 11:22.492
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the discussions that I've had with each of our participants since, I think one of the things that came up was particularly this first one of learning being biological, when you have a separated environment and that is just a reality of your
11:26.693 --> 11:33.937
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of creating and controlling the culture of the environment in a way that can support the biology.
11:34.357 --> 11:43.642
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, you have the opportunity to pace the experience in such a way that assumes your learners are coming in tired and distracted.
11:44.182 --> 11:49.825
[SPEAKER_00]: You have the opportunity to alleviate some of that time pressure to provide them with space.
11:50.265 --> 11:59.148
[SPEAKER_00]: to make sure that there's food available to them because if you're hungry, your body releases hunger hormones and hunger hormones shut down your own plasticity.
11:59.728 --> 12:15.034
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have these sort of opportunities to help really lean into the design of the biological requirements and control those in a way that's very difficult in a team meeting on the go-out work where the manager is trying to teach somebody to support that, right?
12:15.574 --> 12:31.345
[SPEAKER_00]: With the relationships component, I think you also have a huge opportunity to create environments of pure accountability of bringing in experts who are not people that they might otherwise be exposed to who they can build relationships with.
12:31.645 --> 12:43.920
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's still a lot that you can do around the social nature of learning and make it about learning between humans and with humans, it doesn't have to be learning with the person who sits next to them, right?
12:44.340 --> 12:46.302
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a lot that can be done there.
12:46.783 --> 12:51.787
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the situated component definitely is one of the things that comes up as a little more challenging.
12:51.867 --> 13:07.800
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when I was chatting to this participant, what we spoke a lot about was around how do you think about providing opportunities to map to practice or providing opportunities for them to do activities that might take it.
13:08.221 --> 13:11.904
[SPEAKER_00]: They might have something that they take back and you give them the instruction of, do
13:15.727 --> 13:35.404
[SPEAKER_00]: Like encourage them to be met a cognitive and like notice what about the environment is important to this to go activity that we're learning and bring that back into the class and into the discussion so it's not situated in this sense that it's like physically happening in a space that it occurs but the situated
13:35.904 --> 13:50.067
[SPEAKER_00]: nature of where the skills and the learning needs to be performed is inherent in the discussion and is part of the consideration so that you're still building associations to some of those features and realities.
13:50.547 --> 14:00.410
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that was kind of interesting and then the last one is like, I mean, I think effort is the same, but transfer I think is I would argue that like it's actually
14:01.350 --> 14:07.952
[SPEAKER_00]: So transfer and being situated and being needed to transfer can often be in tension with each other.
14:08.192 --> 14:18.694
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if something is really situated, it's easier to queue forward in the moment of the the moment of performance in which it was designed to be used.
14:19.154 --> 14:24.896
[SPEAKER_00]: But that makes it really hard to disembed it and transfer it to a future context that you don't yet know.
14:25.256 --> 14:25.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?
14:31.377 --> 14:35.200
[SPEAKER_00]: all the time because it's deeply sort of cued by the physical environment that I'm in.
14:35.880 --> 14:40.823
[SPEAKER_00]: That can make it harder for me if my job gets disrupted and I have to take on a brand new role.
14:40.883 --> 14:47.508
[SPEAKER_00]: It can make it much harder for me to understand how those skills could apply and that new context where they're not being automatically cued.
14:47.688 --> 15:02.839
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that external learning organizations have a really big role to play in the transfer piece because they're not as burdened by the situated, which is important as we've already discussed, but intention and they have the opportunity to expansively frame.
15:03.159 --> 15:07.502
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I mean by that is to help learners learn a thing and then
15:08.323 --> 15:17.187
[SPEAKER_00]: provide them examples of all the different kinds of places and contexts that these skills like functionally would have relevance.
15:17.507 --> 15:29.952
[SPEAKER_00]: So a great example of that is if you're teaching coding instead of just bringing in the alumni who's the software engineer in the code that you taught, which is often what we see with coding boot camps and things like that.
15:30.453 --> 15:31.473
[SPEAKER_00]: What about bringing in
15:33.814 --> 15:51.935
[SPEAKER_00]: who didn't go on to do anything to do specifically with being a software engineer, but instead of using the skills that they let in his programming really divers ways, like they've used the idea of logical thinking and syntax to design their own personal training business.
15:52.455 --> 16:00.886
[SPEAKER_00]: or they've used coding to help them expand their skillset and enter into marketing automation at work.
16:01.106 --> 16:08.836
[SPEAKER_00]: Or they've not become the exact thing, but you enter as an organization who is a little bit, not as,
16:09.597 --> 16:13.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Proximit to whether learning is happening, that's actually a huge asset.
16:13.480 --> 16:19.224
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, transfer is something I did want to talk about because I do feel like it is so important.
16:19.464 --> 16:35.296
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you gave some great examples there about, you know, maybe, you know, not just sort of showing how oh, someone can maybe use this learning experience to sort of achieve maybe the more expected goal of coding boot camp, become a software coder, but also how maybe just the way you begin to
16:38.698 --> 16:48.282
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you have other things that you've learned about what really helps with adults transfer learning into those new roles, new projects, new performance situations?
16:48.982 --> 16:50.183
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, great question.
16:50.643 --> 16:55.225
[SPEAKER_00]: I've just come off for sort of a six year like focus of learning jets.
16:55.585 --> 16:58.066
[SPEAKER_00]: That was like I went down a very deep.
16:58.766 --> 16:59.487
[SPEAKER_00]: rather than health.
17:00.147 --> 17:07.593
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just want to share a little bit about my own journey with that and how it changed, how I think about cancer change, if that's okay.
17:08.293 --> 17:16.119
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I went into this, I really understood transfer as being you learn something and then you're able to immediately apply.
17:16.139 --> 17:20.882
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll find that learning happens in a classroom or a formal kind of environment of some kind.
17:21.242 --> 17:22.303
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the next day,
17:24.905 --> 17:37.891
[SPEAKER_00]: And that sort of view of transfer has been historically what we've had for about a hundred years from very old school as Thorndark and who has a theory called Common Elements.
17:38.331 --> 17:50.776
[SPEAKER_00]: That if something had common elements, you could transfer it to it and they would do these tests where you would put a student in a learning environment that was like a math class and then the next day they could apply.
17:50.816 --> 17:52.817
[SPEAKER_00]: The principles of the lay of the math posture and novel
17:54.795 --> 18:07.139
[SPEAKER_00]: low and behold, this didn't work and there's been entire books written about like transfer on trial, the elusive transfer doesn't exist like these kinds of headings.
18:08.060 --> 18:23.045
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I've come as of came to realize that's because we have a very narrow view of what transfer is and we were measuring transfer as the person only being able to apply exactly what was
18:23.705 --> 18:25.766
[SPEAKER_00]: given to them, you know, 10 minutes before.
18:26.066 --> 18:34.670
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were also in that scenario assuming that the thing that they were taught, 10 minutes before they were taught well, which isn't necessarily true, right?
18:34.990 --> 18:49.957
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I started to notice as I stepped back from transfer in this sort of view was that people are able to transfer in things to approach novel problems that aren't necessarily the
18:51.638 --> 18:59.044
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was this study done by Dan Schwartz, who's the current dean of the Graduate School Education at Stanford about 20 years ago.
18:59.064 --> 19:10.212
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, I think, really, there's this sort of one paragraph in it that is so illustrative of this, where they had, they were trying to teach students about bold eagles.
19:10.712 --> 19:13.374
[SPEAKER_00]: They then got them to do a project on bold eagles.
19:13.475 --> 19:20.260
[SPEAKER_00]: And what they noticed was that while students didn't use exactly what they were taught, they were actually drawing
19:20.760 --> 19:28.202
[SPEAKER_00]: from parts of knowledge that they've acquired throughout their entire like 13 years of schooling to solve this problem.
19:28.962 --> 19:30.323
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course they are, right?
19:30.403 --> 19:38.485
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we don't have control over how somebody's neural architecture looks about what cues forward what knowledge for them.
19:39.205 --> 19:46.508
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we can do is make sure that we help and surface people to use what knowledge they already have to look at them
19:48.128 --> 19:59.637
[SPEAKER_00]: that they already have a lot to work with, that they've learned life and their professional life and their schooling and their personal life and to bring that forward to approach novel tasks that they have never done before.
20:00.117 --> 20:11.846
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's sort of how I started to change my view of transfer to be much more about how do you bring forward whatever it is you have to approach a novel task and to start to solve it.
20:12.206 --> 20:13.607
[SPEAKER_00]: You might not get 100% of the way.
20:15.455 --> 20:25.863
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're definitely going to have some sort of first principles, some basic knowledge or analogies from your life that you can bring forward that irrelevant to get you going.
20:26.363 --> 20:37.632
[SPEAKER_00]: And so through that line of inquiry, we decided to do a study that looked at a place where this kind of novel role transfer happens with great frequency.
20:37.932 --> 20:39.193
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's because sometimes
20:42.535 --> 20:54.982
[SPEAKER_00]: it's good to go what we call bird watching like you go to the habitat where you know the bird will be to study it rather than just like walking outside and looking up and hoping to find that bird in your sky.
20:55.222 --> 21:01.086
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we did and we we studied 75 consultants in the sort of early parts of
21:08.770 --> 21:13.977
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing a quality assurance testing for an RICOL software implementation.
21:14.718 --> 21:21.406
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm doing a due diligence assessment for a private equity takeover of an online retailer.
21:22.147 --> 21:26.112
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm doing a go-to-market strategy for a knee reconstruction device.
21:26.953 --> 21:35.655
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm helping with the change management plans for the leadership office for an M&A for company, right?
21:36.255 --> 21:44.977
[SPEAKER_00]: Like really different jobs like to anybody outside of consulting, you're like don't need entirely different degrees to do those, right?
21:45.177 --> 21:47.178
[SPEAKER_00]: But one person is doing all of these.
21:47.198 --> 21:49.658
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we looked at like how is it that they do them?
21:50.098 --> 21:53.019
[SPEAKER_00]: And two are reasonably successful level and there's
21:57.200 --> 22:03.945
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what we found was that there were a series of individual practices that these consultants often demonstrated.
22:04.426 --> 22:21.098
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a series of environmental features that were present in the two different consulting organizations that we looked at and there were also a set of managerial practices of the new manager that they were going and that was on the novel role.
22:21.898 --> 22:39.868
[SPEAKER_00]: and so we took all of those and then we designed interventions focused on the individual practices and a managerial practices and ultimately what we found over the series of design-based studies was that only the managerial practices actually had a predictive outcome on if and
22:40.148 --> 22:54.691
[SPEAKER_00]: a learner was able to successfully transfer knowledge to a novel project in novel task, as measured by their managing director's evaluation of their performance and time to competency in the novel world.
22:55.212 --> 23:02.833
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I would take from that is that, first I would caution that we're talking about elite consultants who probably went to elite universities.
23:03.414 --> 23:07.815
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that often I think means that maybe some of the effect
23:09.835 --> 23:18.105
[SPEAKER_00]: Personal practices might have been negligible for us to detect because they were already all performing them to such a baseline.
23:18.446 --> 23:22.731
[SPEAKER_00]: If that makes sense, just based on sort of who they are and how they got there.
23:23.252 --> 23:27.217
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas like if we intervened with the personal practices in a different context,
23:27.637 --> 23:31.220
[SPEAKER_00]: I question I have is like would we actually also see that as predictive?
23:31.540 --> 23:37.164
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't want people to take away what I'm saying is like individual practices around transfer don't matter.
23:37.844 --> 23:42.087
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just to say that in this context we didn't see that as being predictive.
23:43.068 --> 23:56.615
[SPEAKER_00]: But the manager's pace, I think, is something that is interesting, especially for learning businesses like you're talking about, because in the audience, yeah, because they don't always have control over what the manager does, right?
23:56.695 --> 24:03.278
[SPEAKER_00]: But the manager plays a hugely outsized role in alertness ability to transfer and apply learning on the job.
24:05.134 --> 24:06.575
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, that's interesting.
24:06.695 --> 24:19.926
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you said, it's a potential challenge, but it does perhaps suggest there might be some interventions or resources that could come along with, okay, here you are as an individual coming to this course, this conference.
24:20.426 --> 24:30.775
[SPEAKER_02]: Here are some materials you might take back and share with your manager when you get back, perhaps to sort of prime that manager to be most supportive of that learner applying and transferring knowledge.
24:31.473 --> 24:45.093
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and one very specific behavior that I think was sort of outsized in the set was the managers role in helping them connect prior learning to the novel context.
24:45.473 --> 24:47.796
[SPEAKER_00]: So we would notice that they would say things like
24:48.517 --> 25:00.206
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know how you went to that conference and there you did that whole session on I'm just going to make something up here like you know how to how to structure unstructured data to make it effective in AI models.
25:00.646 --> 25:02.107
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that's something.
25:02.167 --> 25:06.010
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of those things that could be really interesting to how we're approaching this problem.
25:06.390 --> 25:09.173
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love you to go away and explicitly do that mapping.
25:09.833 --> 25:13.774
[SPEAKER_00]: by helping them, by inviting them, firstly, to do that.
25:13.894 --> 25:15.755
[SPEAKER_00]: You're, again, we talked about queuing.
25:16.155 --> 25:23.298
[SPEAKER_00]: The manager is then queuing the learner to start blank, oh, I have to go back and retrieve all these things and bring them here.
25:23.338 --> 25:28.740
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I'm going to start making connections between this thing that I'm doing and those pricing that I've learned.
25:28.840 --> 25:32.021
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, learning is about creating a connection between junior arms.
25:32.461 --> 25:47.815
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's like, that is one really important practice is as a manager taking responsibility for guiding the learner to think about how the things they learn in x-context apply to the specific task that you're doing.
25:48.395 --> 25:52.819
[SPEAKER_00]: and sometimes that also means helping them with that reasoning.
25:53.199 --> 26:07.431
[SPEAKER_00]: So that being might mean having them do that thinking bring it back and then engage in the reasoning with them to help them get it right because remember we talked about how if you try to say a prior learning sometimes you're and they're going to get 80% of the way there based on everything that you already know.
26:07.671 --> 26:23.094
[SPEAKER_00]: So the manager is quite important in sort of making sure that we don't have what one of my colleagues calls overzealous transfer where you are over excited, transferring forward things that shouldn't apply to this novel context.
26:23.715 --> 26:38.021
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also making me think too that there's the potential for learning business who would have, say, for example, a history of what a learner took in terms of courses or attended conferences with at least that learning business and so there would be some potential for
26:53.678 --> 26:54.498
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely.
26:54.518 --> 27:12.361
[SPEAKER_00]: So from my own teaching practice, a lot of this work really changed how how I teach myself and had that tough moment in the mirror where I was like, oh, that's like some of this needs to change based on these findings and one of the things that I changed to is in every class.
27:13.301 --> 27:22.643
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that this is hard because we're all time pressed, but I actually make intentional space of three or four minutes of okay today we're going to be talking about
27:23.503 --> 27:24.544
[SPEAKER_00]: creative problem solving.
27:24.584 --> 27:28.307
[SPEAKER_00]: I teach a lot of skills that are a creative and cognitive skills.
27:28.887 --> 27:30.588
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've been to the creative problem solving.
27:30.708 --> 27:37.513
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to spend the next three of four minutes really bringing in what do you think creative problem solving is?
27:37.634 --> 27:38.834
[SPEAKER_00]: Where are some examples of
27:39.615 --> 27:40.515
[SPEAKER_00]: creative problem solving.
27:40.535 --> 27:44.076
[SPEAKER_00]: Where are some examples that you've seen problems solving that wasn't creative?
27:44.516 --> 27:45.957
[SPEAKER_00]: How are those two things different?
27:46.377 --> 27:53.518
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I am doing in that moment is helping them transfer in everything that they know from doesn't matter where it's from.
27:53.538 --> 27:58.920
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, it could be they weren't creative problem solving in an improv class that they did at a...
27:59.860 --> 28:01.841
[SPEAKER_00]: mother daughter event at their kids school.
28:01.921 --> 28:03.881
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it doesn't matter where it comes from, right?
28:04.181 --> 28:08.182
[SPEAKER_00]: So bring in what they know and help them start to read and through it.
28:08.262 --> 28:15.944
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then they're starting from this place of, I already have some things that I know about what we're talking about.
28:16.284 --> 28:22.466
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other benefit is then, as we start to engage in learning over this course of this
28:25.987 --> 28:40.884
[SPEAKER_00]: more able to connect the new knowledge to existing knowledge, which means it's going to be more durable and easy to retrieve because the more connected it is and the more associated with existing retrieval pathways that is the easier it is for us to recall.
28:41.405 --> 28:56.870
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's like a massive win for the durability and then the second piece is that if there's anything in their existing mental model that I actually want them to unlearn, I'm bringing that forward so that this new knowledge can help sort of with that reorganization.
28:57.910 --> 29:06.315
[SPEAKER_00]: And it means that if they ever default to sort of the the old way of thinking or maybe that I needed them to unlearn this new knowledge is also attached to it.
29:06.395 --> 29:08.497
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they might go away to do it.
29:08.597 --> 29:11.298
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, actually, no, I've got to do this other thing too.
29:11.399 --> 29:11.879
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
29:12.559 --> 29:12.779
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
29:12.819 --> 29:16.802
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a really helpful practice that I've extrapolated.
29:23.627 --> 29:46.624
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to go back to the principle around sort of the role of social relationships and learning, and that can be, I guess, more formal mentorships or more informal sort of just relationships with others who are doing similar kinds of work or thinking, I am, again, thinking about our listeners who primarily don't have access to necessarily mentors on the job for those learners.
29:47.585 --> 30:01.785
[SPEAKER_02]: But sort of what can they do still on the social side that might sort of tap into some of those relationships in the way that they can help make sure that the learning gets to take advantage of that importance of the social role in just how we we learn.
30:02.448 --> 30:09.251
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really a fastening thing to me in corporate learning and learning businesses and stuff.
30:09.271 --> 30:19.115
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk a lot about cohort and community, but sometimes we don't actually recognize that it's not just nice and makes the environment great and good for a network.
30:19.395 --> 30:45.802
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, these sorts of features of COVID and community make learning more durable because when we learn things in ways that is through story, that someone else tells us that starts to engage our ability to have empathy, empathy is actually a really if one of the most effective and neurological experiences that we can have to help us reorganize pre-existing mental models.
30:45.822 --> 30:47.803
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to be able to do that much more fluidly.
30:48.283 --> 30:51.365
[SPEAKER_00]: through empathy than in other ways, like without empathy.
30:51.725 --> 31:08.973
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one example, but there are so many the other things are, you know, by hearing different people's ways of speaking and things like that, we start to be able to sort of start to engage in understanding if there's a language in a discourse of the community that we're trying to be part of.
31:09.473 --> 31:14.015
[SPEAKER_00]: and to speak in their terminology and those things have happened socially and informally.
31:14.575 --> 31:18.717
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a whole discipline of literature.
31:19.097 --> 31:29.362
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say it also goes back like hundreds of years, Vagotski, we don't really believe in that learning was this socio-relational process and it's very true.
31:29.662 --> 31:44.956
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would encourage organizations to think about community and cohorts and things like that, not just in a way of like how do we help them network or how do we make sure that they have what type group to organize drinks or whatever it is.
31:45.316 --> 31:50.781
[SPEAKER_00]: But to think about the design of those as part of learning and essential to learning.
31:51.261 --> 31:52.763
[SPEAKER_00]: So sometimes that means
31:53.363 --> 31:59.429
[SPEAKER_00]: needing to facilitate and model what those interactions need to look like at the beginning.
32:00.030 --> 32:12.201
[SPEAKER_00]: It can mean giving bodies within cohorts that are around affinity, but helping them by structuring the beginning of that relationship so they get used to it and get good at it.
32:12.882 --> 32:35.309
[SPEAKER_00]: It can also mean like simple things like providing individuals opportunities to share their mental models, even if it's not in an effort to like, you're not, you're buddied up, but you're just in a classroom and everyone's sitting there to sort of say this and I'd love it if you could share your mental model of how you're thinking about that thing you just described.
32:35.870 --> 32:37.110
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they do that,
32:40.591 --> 32:42.932
[SPEAKER_00]: that's a socio-relational aspect of learning.
32:43.172 --> 32:44.093
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
32:44.113 --> 33:09.766
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a lot that can be done but thinking about it as a necessary requirement for learning and as a design principle in that way and instead of as I sort of said as just like the community and cohort kind of peace is really important and it changes what you come up with it changes how you think about those experiences in your program and how you value them and the time you give them and the weight you give them.
33:10.808 --> 33:11.809
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that makes a lot of sense.
33:11.829 --> 33:20.453
[SPEAKER_02]: I do feel like sometimes we have this, as you said, this idea of cohorts, but really what it comes down to is it's just the, it's the script of people who happen to be going through the class at the same time.
33:20.513 --> 33:25.056
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you leave it only at that, then it's really not doing the work of the cohorts.
33:25.076 --> 33:35.782
[SPEAKER_02]: So thinking about how to more intentionally create those meaningful exchanges so that, you know, one peer can hear from another how they're thinking about a particular situation or topic, I think is,
33:36.102 --> 33:37.545
[SPEAKER_02]: is incredibly powerful.
33:37.725 --> 33:43.756
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just sort of underline what you're saying about making time for that and making sure that it's part of the design.
33:45.252 --> 33:53.234
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm thinking about listeners who maybe, you know, really are looking to improve their workforce relevant offering.
33:53.254 --> 33:59.815
[SPEAKER_02]: So they have these, you know, courses where they really are trying to make their learners able to do better on the job in the profession.
33:59.835 --> 34:09.858
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're thinking about what they might be able to do in the short term to kind of better align their programs with what you know about how adults actually learn at work.
34:15.739 --> 34:24.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So I definitely think I would be encouraging them to make time in their offerings for learners to be metacognitive.
34:25.062 --> 34:37.147
[SPEAKER_00]: I think often we expect to learn to do that separately, or we know it's nice, but we try to sort of make them do it at the same time as being cognitive, like so you can't
34:38.007 --> 34:44.789
[SPEAKER_00]: Blown something and have cognitive attention to that thing you're learning and be mad at cognitive about it at the same time.
34:44.809 --> 34:58.913
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just not possible and so really making intentional moments for learners to think about things like, right as you enter this experience like what are strategies that you find really helpful to
34:59.893 --> 35:24.733
[SPEAKER_00]: to your learning and your attention, what do you need to do right now to adjust your environment to make sure that you'll like shop in a way that meets your goal for this session, even things like as you're in the middle of the learning environment, inviting learners to surface things that are very clear to them and feel very crystallized, but stuff that still feels very uncertain and they don't feel like they have a complete understanding of yet
35:27.535 --> 35:33.962
[SPEAKER_00]: and help them come up with strategies for how they might adjust what they're, how they're thinking or etc.
35:34.463 --> 35:44.032
[SPEAKER_00]: If they're holding onto something really strongly, which just happens a lot, I think with adult learners, you know, have very deeply automated or scrutinized perspective sometimes.
35:44.813 --> 35:51.497
[SPEAKER_00]: and helping them notice when that's as a result of a bias, and that might be inhibiting them to learn.
35:51.517 --> 35:54.019
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I'm sorry, me and my bias, like a cognitive bias.
35:54.059 --> 36:04.445
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, we as humans succumb to dozens and dozens of cognitive biases every day, and for good reason, they help us use less metabolic energy.
36:04.485 --> 36:05.866
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a really good reason for them.
36:05.886 --> 36:08.788
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want them to go away, but it's really good to notice them.
36:09.168 --> 36:15.329
[SPEAKER_00]: So one might be like, all right, you seem to be, are you resisting the new principles that we're teaching right now?
36:15.869 --> 36:22.011
[SPEAKER_00]: And is that coming from a place of genuine critical thinking and skepticism or is that coming from a place of status quo bias?
36:22.591 --> 36:33.473
[SPEAKER_00]: And is that because right now you're really resistant to this because you feel like the way it's done, the way it's always been done, feels comfortable, it feels easier, it feels like it would take less effort.
36:34.413 --> 36:39.116
[SPEAKER_00]: and that's inhibiting your ability to engage with all that and what we're discussing right now.
36:39.476 --> 36:48.901
[SPEAKER_00]: So inviting sort of these conversations into learning experiences is essential because, you know, what the data on medical mission is.
36:49.581 --> 37:11.887
[SPEAKER_00]: on ambiguous is what I'm going to use in that it results in results in better performance, it results in better durability, it results in better transfer of the skills, like it's the single thing that I would do if I was trying to improve my programming and improve the learnability to apply what they're learning in my context to work.
37:18.702 --> 37:23.824
[SPEAKER_02]: folks who come on the leading learning podcast about their approach to their own ongoing learning.
37:23.844 --> 37:33.287
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would love to hear from you if you have specific habits or practices or sources that you use to continue to grow professionally and if you want also personally.
37:34.087 --> 37:44.673
[SPEAKER_00]: I losing this like funny tension sometimes where I know like things I should do and then I catch myself not doing them and then I get mad at myself like disaster spiral.
37:45.594 --> 38:00.022
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think something that I personally find helpful every so often as an educator is to sometimes intentionally go out and learn something really new and to practice some of the things that I
38:01.283 --> 38:05.506
[SPEAKER_00]: use as educational tools for others or instructional tools for others myself.
38:06.186 --> 38:15.192
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for example, I, this is very esoteric, I apologize, but I'm currently learning to become what's called a champagne specialist.
38:15.953 --> 38:26.960
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's just because I was like, I'm going to go later, that's something that I don't really know a whole lot about, that sort of seems like it would be fun and I was looking for something that had a very social kind of component to it.
38:27.740 --> 38:32.344
[SPEAKER_00]: So I do try to practice these intentional moments of medical ignition myself.
38:32.884 --> 38:38.128
[SPEAKER_00]: I try to think about regulating my own learning like was I paying attention in that class?
38:38.168 --> 38:39.329
[SPEAKER_00]: What was bothering me?
38:39.750 --> 38:42.352
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was I not how I changed that for next time?
38:42.852 --> 38:51.119
[SPEAKER_00]: If I come in next time after having also been tired and frustrated, what are some steps that I could take to adjust how I'm showing up?
38:51.139 --> 38:53.501
[SPEAKER_00]: So I really try to interrogate that.
38:56.168 --> 39:04.770
[SPEAKER_00]: All of this is just to say to you as I think in addition to being really good as being a lifelong learner to have really good awareness of how you learn.
39:05.450 --> 39:16.113
[SPEAKER_00]: As a person, I also think it's really important to for my human standard practice sometimes to remember what it means to be a learner when you're an educator.
39:17.113 --> 39:32.102
[SPEAKER_00]: and to notice what's tick-tricky, what's easy, what are things that you've instruction on where you're doing for a long time that don't actually work, that do work, that you does that make sense, so it can be a good practice.
39:32.722 --> 39:44.591
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's an excellent point about your own continued learning that especially if you are someone who spends a lot of time educating others to put yourself back in the shoes of those folks you're working with.
39:44.611 --> 39:51.497
[SPEAKER_02]: It gives you that empathy which you were talking about earlier is such an important part of how we learn in our narrow plus city piece.
39:52.865 --> 39:56.048
[SPEAKER_02]: So we've covered a bit of ground in our time together today.
39:56.108 --> 40:05.717
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you were to stress a point or two points or three points for listeners, what is it that you are hoping they take away from listening to our conversation?
40:07.135 --> 40:29.205
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think especially for folks who work within the learning businesses, I would be remembering that like what of the five principles even though, you know, one of them is situated that don't walk away from this as saying, oh, we can't do that, remember that you actually have a superpower in terms of your ability to control for the neurobiology.
40:29.905 --> 40:49.299
[SPEAKER_00]: in terms of your ability to expansively frame and in your ability to intentionally craft social relationships that actually is unique and really assetful as compared to learning that sometimes, learning that happens in corporate L and D or in the flow of work context.
40:49.339 --> 40:51.181
[SPEAKER_00]: So please don't at all be disheartened.
40:51.201 --> 40:52.742
[SPEAKER_00]: I just want to really underscore that.
40:53.062 --> 40:55.344
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there are real assets to lean into.
40:56.084 --> 41:13.793
[SPEAKER_00]: That would I think be one, and if I can have a second small one, that is also just to like recognize and cut yourself some slack right now, because learning right now and the world is in such a state of flux and there's so much ambiguity in the business.
41:14.173 --> 41:17.775
[SPEAKER_00]: There's tools that are coming up every day and it feels like if you, you know,
41:18.295 --> 41:26.502
[SPEAKER_00]: haven't read every single New York Times, HBR,acle and tried the three new things that launched last week by 10 AM you're already behind.
41:27.082 --> 41:28.143
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not true.
41:28.243 --> 41:34.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the fundamental principles of how humans learn are the same with all without AI.
41:34.848 --> 41:41.634
[SPEAKER_00]: And so just really hold on to the fact that we don't you don't need to get caught in a rack rat race and you're doing well.
41:48.250 --> 41:58.072
[SPEAKER_03]: That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Tessa Forshaw, the cognitive scientist directing the workforce learning and innovation initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
41:58.652 --> 42:00.132
[SPEAKER_03]: Stay with us for our recap.
42:00.452 --> 42:15.935
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll find show notes in a transcript for this episode at leadinglearning.com slash episode for eight zero along with links to Tessa's profile on LinkedIn and where you can learn more about the initiative and the certificate program in workforce and workplace learning.
42:16.675 --> 42:20.236
[SPEAKER_03]: If you found this episode valuable, we'd be grateful if you'd share it.
42:20.656 --> 42:25.417
[SPEAKER_03]: That helps more people benefit from the conversation and it supports the work we do with the podcast.
42:26.177 --> 42:30.577
[SPEAKER_01]: Tessa opened our conversation by reframing what learning actually is.
42:31.017 --> 42:37.859
[SPEAKER_01]: Not content delivery, but a neurobiological process shaped by brain chemistry, hormones, and environment.
42:38.659 --> 42:42.779
[SPEAKER_01]: And that shift in perspective is the foundation of five principles for
42:45.880 --> 42:58.545
[SPEAKER_03]: Those principles that learning is biological, social, situated and requires effort and must transfer give learning designers a science-based lens for evaluating and improving their programs.
42:59.265 --> 43:06.948
[SPEAKER_01]: And she left us with a clear and actually quite easy to implement to make intentional space for metacognition in your programs.
43:07.449 --> 43:09.669
[SPEAKER_01]: The data she says is unambiguous.
43:09.970 --> 43:10.590
[SPEAKER_01]: When learners have
43:14.052 --> 43:17.640
[SPEAKER_01]: then performance, durability, and transfer all improve.
43:18.242 --> 43:19.244
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks again for listening.
43:19.545 --> 43:21.930
[SPEAKER_03]: See you next time on the leading learning podcast.
00:02.935 --> 00:08.298
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to grow the reach, revenue, and impact of your learning business, you're in the right place.
00:08.819 --> 00:09.879
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Celisa Steele.
00:10.300 --> 00:14.062
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Jeff Cobb, and this is the leading learning podcast.
00:16.770 --> 00:18.532
[SPEAKER_01]: Learning isn't just content.
00:18.892 --> 00:26.879
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a neurobiological process, but according to our guest, the way most workplace learning is designed doesn't recognize that reality.
00:27.479 --> 00:41.732
[SPEAKER_03]: Our guest in this episode, number 480, is Dr. Tessa Forshaw, cognitive scientist and faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studies how people work, learn, and create in the flow of their work.
00:42.432 --> 00:59.558
[SPEAKER_01]: In our conversation, Tessa walks through five principles grounded in science, from the fact that learning is biological and social to the importance of situated learning, productive effort and transfer, and she explains what each principle means for how learning experiences should be designed.
01:00.378 --> 01:13.099
[SPEAKER_03]: New and Tesla also explore why learning businesses may have some surprising advantages when it comes to applying these principles and where to focus if you want your programs to make a real difference in how learners perform on the job.
01:13.528 --> 01:25.092
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and Tessa makes a strong case for meta cognition as the single most impactful thing you can build into any learning program to improve retention, durability, and transfer.
01:25.672 --> 01:38.556
[SPEAKER_03]: If you design the liver or lead learning experiences and you want to better align what you do with what the science actually tells us about how adults learn, then this conversation with Dr. Tessa Forshaw is for you.
01:44.966 --> 01:50.289
[SPEAKER_02]: You're the faculty chair of the workforce and workplace concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
01:50.309 --> 01:54.231
[SPEAKER_02]: You're also directing the workforce learning and innovation initiative.
01:54.672 --> 01:58.794
[SPEAKER_02]: So maybe tell us a little bit about that initiative and your role with it.
01:59.354 --> 02:00.535
[SPEAKER_00]: Education skills have.
02:00.815 --> 02:16.063
[SPEAKER_00]: spent decades studying how people learn and there's an incredible amount of expertise at HGSE amongst my colleagues who studied education and learning for such a long time, but rarely has that expertise being pointed at workforce learning.
02:16.543 --> 02:25.686
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not like you turn 18 and don't continue into a university and then magically your brain learns differently and all the principles changed.
02:26.427 --> 02:27.167
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not true.
02:28.007 --> 02:41.312
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this initiative is really focused on how to we make sure that we're extending and applying all the science that we know about how people learn that is deeply embedding HSC into this very high priority population.
02:41.892 --> 02:44.795
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are three streams associated with the program.
02:45.235 --> 02:52.222
[SPEAKER_00]: The first is this idea of preparing so a concentration in the Master's Program in Workforce and Workplace Learning.
02:52.242 --> 02:55.625
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like a major for students in the Master's Program.
02:56.365 --> 03:01.290
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really about how do we prepare the next generation of Workforce Learning Leaders.
03:01.850 --> 03:04.493
[SPEAKER_00]: The second component is what we're calling E-Clip.
03:05.013 --> 03:09.237
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's focused on professional certificates in workforce and workplace learning.
03:09.938 --> 03:15.864
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we've recently did the first cohort of that earlier in the year, we have another one coming up in July.
03:15.884 --> 03:21.970
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the, again, the first type of workforce learning focus certificate at HDSC.
03:22.010 --> 03:23.332
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's very exciting.
03:23.912 --> 03:40.456
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the third component of the initiative is what we call discover and that's really about applied research partnerships with organizations where we partner with them to do typically design-based research in real organizations in real contexts, focused around real problems of practice.
03:40.936 --> 03:47.018
[SPEAKER_00]: We apply rigid methodologies to really uncover what's working, what's not, and then share that with the field.
03:48.940 --> 03:56.966
[SPEAKER_02]: So I've read that you've asserted that workforce learning still doesn't really match what we know about how people learn.
03:57.586 --> 04:12.356
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would love to hear what you see as some of the biggest mismatches between that science of learning and what we know and then the way that adult workers are commonly taught or the way we design learning for those adult workers.
04:13.554 --> 04:15.795
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that that's what you've gleaned from my work.
04:15.815 --> 04:23.779
[SPEAKER_00]: They definitely think that when they talk to a lot of learning leaders, learning is often discussed as content delivery.
04:24.200 --> 04:32.224
[SPEAKER_00]: So they will talk about learning as the content that is being created or the event that is being held.
04:32.844 --> 04:37.686
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's really important that we remember that learning isn't content.
04:38.027 --> 04:40.108
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning is a neurobiological process.
04:40.848 --> 04:51.753
[SPEAKER_00]: and that process is influenced by chemicals in our brain and hormones in our body that are shaped by the environment and the context that we sit within.
04:52.493 --> 05:01.657
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when we sort of understand learning in that lens, it both opens up where learning can happen and what it looks like, but it also gives
05:08.420 --> 05:17.426
[SPEAKER_00]: create and foster those positive neurochemicals and hormones to inside learning and sort of alleviate the ones that don't.
05:17.666 --> 05:27.032
[SPEAKER_00]: And we put that responsibility on L&D teams or on organizations providing learning experiences in a way that it hasn't typically been considered before.
05:27.823 --> 05:41.913
[SPEAKER_02]: You were saying before we got started that one of the things that you talk about in the certificate are five principles for sort of the future of workplace learning so maybe could you just sort of outline and briefly explain those those five principles.
05:43.241 --> 05:44.482
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I absolutely can.
05:44.502 --> 05:49.846
[SPEAKER_00]: So the five principles that we talk about start with this idea of learning is biological.
05:50.407 --> 05:57.893
[SPEAKER_00]: So we understand that sort of behavior change comes from changes in the mind, which comes from changes in the brain, which comes from changes in the cell.
06:03.717 --> 06:22.697
[SPEAKER_00]: neuroplasticity and so there's a lot of there's a lot of fake going on there but there is a seed of truth or a grain of truth and that is that neuroplasticity is the foundation of learning the ability for us to create a neural pathway between two neurons is the foundation of all learning.
06:23.237 --> 06:47.022
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we understand that their cell influences, the brain, which influences the mind, which influences behavior, that helps us think about how we can create learning in organizations, especially because so many workplaces are full of things that make that biological process harder, therefore love cortisol, therefore love cognitive overload, therefore of constant context
06:51.523 --> 06:56.885
[SPEAKER_00]: when stress takes over and your brain doesn't operate at its peak performance anymore.
06:57.325 --> 07:14.610
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think when we understand learning is biological we can also start to understand that learning at work is actually very rarely about effort or attention and it's much more about the conditions in our bodies and our environments that are blocking this cellular change from happening.
07:14.950 --> 07:16.231
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's sort of one component.
07:16.431 --> 07:19.093
[SPEAKER_00]: The next principle is that learning is social.
07:19.533 --> 07:32.443
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we know from decades of research on expertise development and the nature of learning that people become experts by being around people who are further along in that area of expertise.
07:33.003 --> 07:47.713
[SPEAKER_00]: So having people more experienced others share mental models, expose their reasoning to you, and really I think faster that sort of traditional romantic idea of a apprenticeship that we have from hundreds of years ago.
07:48.054 --> 07:52.037
[SPEAKER_00]: So learning is very social and it happens in a relationship with others.
07:52.877 --> 08:07.936
[SPEAKER_00]: The third principle that learning is situated, and so this is really focused on the idea that pulling people out of work to go and learn is a really tough design choice because that the brain encodes skills along with the context.
08:08.056 --> 08:09.237
[SPEAKER_00]: in which they are learned in.
08:09.257 --> 08:25.487
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of people don't realize that our environment actually plays a huge role in the retrieval of learning because we associate different knowledge and skills practices to the physical environment in which we learn them.
08:25.887 --> 08:30.550
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then when we're in those environments, they can help us cure it forward.
08:31.031 --> 08:52.525
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if we learn something in and abstracted classroom on a beautiful L&D center, that sort of offers a campus, and then we're supposed to go back and apply it on a factory floor, that's going to be very hard because the environment isn't queuing that knowledge that we've learned to be brought forward and those retrieval pathways aren't yet strong,
08:55.167 --> 08:57.249
[SPEAKER_00]: the fourth principle is that learning takes effort.
08:57.809 --> 09:05.795
[SPEAKER_00]: So we talked a little bit about learning being a biological process and that they're being the creation of a pathway between 10 neurons.
09:06.276 --> 09:14.922
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you could imagine for me like a bank of sand and you have a stick at either end and you want to create a pathway between the two of them at stays.
09:15.823 --> 09:19.366
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to really dig into the stand and put some effort in there.
09:19.426 --> 09:20.786
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the same in your mind.
09:20.826 --> 09:24.169
[SPEAKER_00]: You actually need effort to forge that pathway.
09:24.189 --> 09:25.329
[SPEAKER_00]: So learning takes effort.
09:25.750 --> 09:32.835
[SPEAKER_00]: So being easy and just like super fun isn't necessarily what we're going for.
09:32.875 --> 09:36.357
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going for experiences that provide opportunities for effort.
09:37.137 --> 09:41.140
[SPEAKER_00]: And then finally that learning has to transfer so that the point of
09:45.683 --> 10:00.609
[SPEAKER_00]: And sort of that means that when we're especially today, where those future projects are often ambiguous and we don't know how they're going to change, that means that when we think about learning, we have to think about designing opportunities to expansively frame all of the different ways things could be applied.
10:00.989 --> 10:07.151
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, that's part of helping that sort of encoding it in a way that's much easier for us to retrieve at that moment and meet.
10:07.311 --> 10:08.652
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a five principles.
10:11.141 --> 10:16.824
[SPEAKER_02]: As I've shared with you, most of our listeners work in what we call learning businesses.
10:17.044 --> 10:19.946
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they are all about trying to support those learners.
10:20.106 --> 10:24.449
[SPEAKER_02]: And they want to help them improve on the job at work as professionals.
10:24.869 --> 10:30.472
[SPEAKER_02]: But they don't tend to have that sort of direct access to their learners on the job.
10:30.973 --> 10:34.315
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm just wondering how these principles might inform
10:35.255 --> 10:58.467
[SPEAKER_02]: how folks like that who have a little bit of a, you know, sort of a bit of a distance between them and some of their learners in a way or at least their learners workplaces, how might those principles inform how they think about building courses, creating programs, other learning experiences, are some of those principles more or less relevant when thinking about kind of learning businesses
11:00.928 --> 11:02.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a great question.
11:02.748 --> 11:08.049
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the first version of a program, we had some people from learning businesses as you described them.
11:08.690 --> 11:22.492
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the discussions that I've had with each of our participants since, I think one of the things that came up was particularly this first one of learning being biological, when you have a separated environment and that is just a reality of your
11:26.693 --> 11:33.937
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of creating and controlling the culture of the environment in a way that can support the biology.
11:34.357 --> 11:43.642
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, you have the opportunity to pace the experience in such a way that assumes your learners are coming in tired and distracted.
11:44.182 --> 11:49.825
[SPEAKER_00]: You have the opportunity to alleviate some of that time pressure to provide them with space.
11:50.265 --> 11:59.148
[SPEAKER_00]: to make sure that there's food available to them because if you're hungry, your body releases hunger hormones and hunger hormones shut down your own plasticity.
11:59.728 --> 12:15.034
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have these sort of opportunities to help really lean into the design of the biological requirements and control those in a way that's very difficult in a team meeting on the go-out work where the manager is trying to teach somebody to support that, right?
12:15.574 --> 12:31.345
[SPEAKER_00]: With the relationships component, I think you also have a huge opportunity to create environments of pure accountability of bringing in experts who are not people that they might otherwise be exposed to who they can build relationships with.
12:31.645 --> 12:43.920
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's still a lot that you can do around the social nature of learning and make it about learning between humans and with humans, it doesn't have to be learning with the person who sits next to them, right?
12:44.340 --> 12:46.302
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a lot that can be done there.
12:46.783 --> 12:51.787
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the situated component definitely is one of the things that comes up as a little more challenging.
12:51.867 --> 13:07.800
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when I was chatting to this participant, what we spoke a lot about was around how do you think about providing opportunities to map to practice or providing opportunities for them to do activities that might take it.
13:08.221 --> 13:11.904
[SPEAKER_00]: They might have something that they take back and you give them the instruction of, do
13:15.727 --> 13:35.404
[SPEAKER_00]: Like encourage them to be met a cognitive and like notice what about the environment is important to this to go activity that we're learning and bring that back into the class and into the discussion so it's not situated in this sense that it's like physically happening in a space that it occurs but the situated
13:35.904 --> 13:50.067
[SPEAKER_00]: nature of where the skills and the learning needs to be performed is inherent in the discussion and is part of the consideration so that you're still building associations to some of those features and realities.
13:50.547 --> 14:00.410
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that was kind of interesting and then the last one is like, I mean, I think effort is the same, but transfer I think is I would argue that like it's actually
14:01.350 --> 14:07.952
[SPEAKER_00]: So transfer and being situated and being needed to transfer can often be in tension with each other.
14:08.192 --> 14:18.694
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if something is really situated, it's easier to queue forward in the moment of the the moment of performance in which it was designed to be used.
14:19.154 --> 14:24.896
[SPEAKER_00]: But that makes it really hard to disembed it and transfer it to a future context that you don't yet know.
14:25.256 --> 14:25.996
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?
14:31.377 --> 14:35.200
[SPEAKER_00]: all the time because it's deeply sort of cued by the physical environment that I'm in.
14:35.880 --> 14:40.823
[SPEAKER_00]: That can make it harder for me if my job gets disrupted and I have to take on a brand new role.
14:40.883 --> 14:47.508
[SPEAKER_00]: It can make it much harder for me to understand how those skills could apply and that new context where they're not being automatically cued.
14:47.688 --> 15:02.839
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that external learning organizations have a really big role to play in the transfer piece because they're not as burdened by the situated, which is important as we've already discussed, but intention and they have the opportunity to expansively frame.
15:03.159 --> 15:07.502
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I mean by that is to help learners learn a thing and then
15:08.323 --> 15:17.187
[SPEAKER_00]: provide them examples of all the different kinds of places and contexts that these skills like functionally would have relevance.
15:17.507 --> 15:29.952
[SPEAKER_00]: So a great example of that is if you're teaching coding instead of just bringing in the alumni who's the software engineer in the code that you taught, which is often what we see with coding boot camps and things like that.
15:30.453 --> 15:31.473
[SPEAKER_00]: What about bringing in
15:33.814 --> 15:51.935
[SPEAKER_00]: who didn't go on to do anything to do specifically with being a software engineer, but instead of using the skills that they let in his programming really divers ways, like they've used the idea of logical thinking and syntax to design their own personal training business.
15:52.455 --> 16:00.886
[SPEAKER_00]: or they've used coding to help them expand their skillset and enter into marketing automation at work.
16:01.106 --> 16:08.836
[SPEAKER_00]: Or they've not become the exact thing, but you enter as an organization who is a little bit, not as,
16:09.597 --> 16:13.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Proximit to whether learning is happening, that's actually a huge asset.
16:13.480 --> 16:19.224
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, transfer is something I did want to talk about because I do feel like it is so important.
16:19.464 --> 16:35.296
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you gave some great examples there about, you know, maybe, you know, not just sort of showing how oh, someone can maybe use this learning experience to sort of achieve maybe the more expected goal of coding boot camp, become a software coder, but also how maybe just the way you begin to
16:38.698 --> 16:48.282
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you have other things that you've learned about what really helps with adults transfer learning into those new roles, new projects, new performance situations?
16:48.982 --> 16:50.183
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, great question.
16:50.643 --> 16:55.225
[SPEAKER_00]: I've just come off for sort of a six year like focus of learning jets.
16:55.585 --> 16:58.066
[SPEAKER_00]: That was like I went down a very deep.
16:58.766 --> 16:59.487
[SPEAKER_00]: rather than health.
17:00.147 --> 17:07.593
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just want to share a little bit about my own journey with that and how it changed, how I think about cancer change, if that's okay.
17:08.293 --> 17:16.119
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I went into this, I really understood transfer as being you learn something and then you're able to immediately apply.
17:16.139 --> 17:20.882
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll find that learning happens in a classroom or a formal kind of environment of some kind.
17:21.242 --> 17:22.303
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the next day,
17:24.905 --> 17:37.891
[SPEAKER_00]: And that sort of view of transfer has been historically what we've had for about a hundred years from very old school as Thorndark and who has a theory called Common Elements.
17:38.331 --> 17:50.776
[SPEAKER_00]: That if something had common elements, you could transfer it to it and they would do these tests where you would put a student in a learning environment that was like a math class and then the next day they could apply.
17:50.816 --> 17:52.817
[SPEAKER_00]: The principles of the lay of the math posture and novel
17:54.795 --> 18:07.139
[SPEAKER_00]: low and behold, this didn't work and there's been entire books written about like transfer on trial, the elusive transfer doesn't exist like these kinds of headings.
18:08.060 --> 18:23.045
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I've come as of came to realize that's because we have a very narrow view of what transfer is and we were measuring transfer as the person only being able to apply exactly what was
18:23.705 --> 18:25.766
[SPEAKER_00]: given to them, you know, 10 minutes before.
18:26.066 --> 18:34.670
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were also in that scenario assuming that the thing that they were taught, 10 minutes before they were taught well, which isn't necessarily true, right?
18:34.990 --> 18:49.957
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I started to notice as I stepped back from transfer in this sort of view was that people are able to transfer in things to approach novel problems that aren't necessarily the
18:51.638 --> 18:59.044
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was this study done by Dan Schwartz, who's the current dean of the Graduate School Education at Stanford about 20 years ago.
18:59.064 --> 19:10.212
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, I think, really, there's this sort of one paragraph in it that is so illustrative of this, where they had, they were trying to teach students about bold eagles.
19:10.712 --> 19:13.374
[SPEAKER_00]: They then got them to do a project on bold eagles.
19:13.475 --> 19:20.260
[SPEAKER_00]: And what they noticed was that while students didn't use exactly what they were taught, they were actually drawing
19:20.760 --> 19:28.202
[SPEAKER_00]: from parts of knowledge that they've acquired throughout their entire like 13 years of schooling to solve this problem.
19:28.962 --> 19:30.323
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course they are, right?
19:30.403 --> 19:38.485
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we don't have control over how somebody's neural architecture looks about what cues forward what knowledge for them.
19:39.205 --> 19:46.508
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we can do is make sure that we help and surface people to use what knowledge they already have to look at them
19:48.128 --> 19:59.637
[SPEAKER_00]: that they already have a lot to work with, that they've learned life and their professional life and their schooling and their personal life and to bring that forward to approach novel tasks that they have never done before.
20:00.117 --> 20:11.846
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's sort of how I started to change my view of transfer to be much more about how do you bring forward whatever it is you have to approach a novel task and to start to solve it.
20:12.206 --> 20:13.607
[SPEAKER_00]: You might not get 100% of the way.
20:15.455 --> 20:25.863
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're definitely going to have some sort of first principles, some basic knowledge or analogies from your life that you can bring forward that irrelevant to get you going.
20:26.363 --> 20:37.632
[SPEAKER_00]: And so through that line of inquiry, we decided to do a study that looked at a place where this kind of novel role transfer happens with great frequency.
20:37.932 --> 20:39.193
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's because sometimes
20:42.535 --> 20:54.982
[SPEAKER_00]: it's good to go what we call bird watching like you go to the habitat where you know the bird will be to study it rather than just like walking outside and looking up and hoping to find that bird in your sky.
20:55.222 --> 21:01.086
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we did and we we studied 75 consultants in the sort of early parts of
21:08.770 --> 21:13.977
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm doing a quality assurance testing for an RICOL software implementation.
21:14.718 --> 21:21.406
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm doing a due diligence assessment for a private equity takeover of an online retailer.
21:22.147 --> 21:26.112
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm doing a go-to-market strategy for a knee reconstruction device.
21:26.953 --> 21:35.655
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm helping with the change management plans for the leadership office for an M&A for company, right?
21:36.255 --> 21:44.977
[SPEAKER_00]: Like really different jobs like to anybody outside of consulting, you're like don't need entirely different degrees to do those, right?
21:45.177 --> 21:47.178
[SPEAKER_00]: But one person is doing all of these.
21:47.198 --> 21:49.658
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we looked at like how is it that they do them?
21:50.098 --> 21:53.019
[SPEAKER_00]: And two are reasonably successful level and there's
21:57.200 --> 22:03.945
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what we found was that there were a series of individual practices that these consultants often demonstrated.
22:04.426 --> 22:21.098
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a series of environmental features that were present in the two different consulting organizations that we looked at and there were also a set of managerial practices of the new manager that they were going and that was on the novel role.
22:21.898 --> 22:39.868
[SPEAKER_00]: and so we took all of those and then we designed interventions focused on the individual practices and a managerial practices and ultimately what we found over the series of design-based studies was that only the managerial practices actually had a predictive outcome on if and
22:40.148 --> 22:54.691
[SPEAKER_00]: a learner was able to successfully transfer knowledge to a novel project in novel task, as measured by their managing director's evaluation of their performance and time to competency in the novel world.
22:55.212 --> 23:02.833
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I would take from that is that, first I would caution that we're talking about elite consultants who probably went to elite universities.
23:03.414 --> 23:07.815
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that often I think means that maybe some of the effect
23:09.835 --> 23:18.105
[SPEAKER_00]: Personal practices might have been negligible for us to detect because they were already all performing them to such a baseline.
23:18.446 --> 23:22.731
[SPEAKER_00]: If that makes sense, just based on sort of who they are and how they got there.
23:23.252 --> 23:27.217
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas like if we intervened with the personal practices in a different context,
23:27.637 --> 23:31.220
[SPEAKER_00]: I question I have is like would we actually also see that as predictive?
23:31.540 --> 23:37.164
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't want people to take away what I'm saying is like individual practices around transfer don't matter.
23:37.844 --> 23:42.087
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just to say that in this context we didn't see that as being predictive.
23:43.068 --> 23:56.615
[SPEAKER_00]: But the manager's pace, I think, is something that is interesting, especially for learning businesses like you're talking about, because in the audience, yeah, because they don't always have control over what the manager does, right?
23:56.695 --> 24:03.278
[SPEAKER_00]: But the manager plays a hugely outsized role in alertness ability to transfer and apply learning on the job.
24:05.134 --> 24:06.575
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, that's interesting.
24:06.695 --> 24:19.926
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you said, it's a potential challenge, but it does perhaps suggest there might be some interventions or resources that could come along with, okay, here you are as an individual coming to this course, this conference.
24:20.426 --> 24:30.775
[SPEAKER_02]: Here are some materials you might take back and share with your manager when you get back, perhaps to sort of prime that manager to be most supportive of that learner applying and transferring knowledge.
24:31.473 --> 24:45.093
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and one very specific behavior that I think was sort of outsized in the set was the managers role in helping them connect prior learning to the novel context.
24:45.473 --> 24:47.796
[SPEAKER_00]: So we would notice that they would say things like
24:48.517 --> 25:00.206
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know how you went to that conference and there you did that whole session on I'm just going to make something up here like you know how to how to structure unstructured data to make it effective in AI models.
25:00.646 --> 25:02.107
[SPEAKER_00]: So, that's something.
25:02.167 --> 25:06.010
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of those things that could be really interesting to how we're approaching this problem.
25:06.390 --> 25:09.173
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love you to go away and explicitly do that mapping.
25:09.833 --> 25:13.774
[SPEAKER_00]: by helping them, by inviting them, firstly, to do that.
25:13.894 --> 25:15.755
[SPEAKER_00]: You're, again, we talked about queuing.
25:16.155 --> 25:23.298
[SPEAKER_00]: The manager is then queuing the learner to start blank, oh, I have to go back and retrieve all these things and bring them here.
25:23.338 --> 25:28.740
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I'm going to start making connections between this thing that I'm doing and those pricing that I've learned.
25:28.840 --> 25:32.021
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, learning is about creating a connection between junior arms.
25:32.461 --> 25:47.815
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's like, that is one really important practice is as a manager taking responsibility for guiding the learner to think about how the things they learn in x-context apply to the specific task that you're doing.
25:48.395 --> 25:52.819
[SPEAKER_00]: and sometimes that also means helping them with that reasoning.
25:53.199 --> 26:07.431
[SPEAKER_00]: So that being might mean having them do that thinking bring it back and then engage in the reasoning with them to help them get it right because remember we talked about how if you try to say a prior learning sometimes you're and they're going to get 80% of the way there based on everything that you already know.
26:07.671 --> 26:23.094
[SPEAKER_00]: So the manager is quite important in sort of making sure that we don't have what one of my colleagues calls overzealous transfer where you are over excited, transferring forward things that shouldn't apply to this novel context.
26:23.715 --> 26:38.021
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also making me think too that there's the potential for learning business who would have, say, for example, a history of what a learner took in terms of courses or attended conferences with at least that learning business and so there would be some potential for
26:53.678 --> 26:54.498
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, absolutely.
26:54.518 --> 27:12.361
[SPEAKER_00]: So from my own teaching practice, a lot of this work really changed how how I teach myself and had that tough moment in the mirror where I was like, oh, that's like some of this needs to change based on these findings and one of the things that I changed to is in every class.
27:13.301 --> 27:22.643
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that this is hard because we're all time pressed, but I actually make intentional space of three or four minutes of okay today we're going to be talking about
27:23.503 --> 27:24.544
[SPEAKER_00]: creative problem solving.
27:24.584 --> 27:28.307
[SPEAKER_00]: I teach a lot of skills that are a creative and cognitive skills.
27:28.887 --> 27:30.588
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've been to the creative problem solving.
27:30.708 --> 27:37.513
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to spend the next three of four minutes really bringing in what do you think creative problem solving is?
27:37.634 --> 27:38.834
[SPEAKER_00]: Where are some examples of
27:39.615 --> 27:40.515
[SPEAKER_00]: creative problem solving.
27:40.535 --> 27:44.076
[SPEAKER_00]: Where are some examples that you've seen problems solving that wasn't creative?
27:44.516 --> 27:45.957
[SPEAKER_00]: How are those two things different?
27:46.377 --> 27:53.518
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I am doing in that moment is helping them transfer in everything that they know from doesn't matter where it's from.
27:53.538 --> 27:58.920
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, it could be they weren't creative problem solving in an improv class that they did at a...
27:59.860 --> 28:01.841
[SPEAKER_00]: mother daughter event at their kids school.
28:01.921 --> 28:03.881
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it doesn't matter where it comes from, right?
28:04.181 --> 28:08.182
[SPEAKER_00]: So bring in what they know and help them start to read and through it.
28:08.262 --> 28:15.944
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then they're starting from this place of, I already have some things that I know about what we're talking about.
28:16.284 --> 28:22.466
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other benefit is then, as we start to engage in learning over this course of this
28:25.987 --> 28:40.884
[SPEAKER_00]: more able to connect the new knowledge to existing knowledge, which means it's going to be more durable and easy to retrieve because the more connected it is and the more associated with existing retrieval pathways that is the easier it is for us to recall.
28:41.405 --> 28:56.870
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's like a massive win for the durability and then the second piece is that if there's anything in their existing mental model that I actually want them to unlearn, I'm bringing that forward so that this new knowledge can help sort of with that reorganization.
28:57.910 --> 29:06.315
[SPEAKER_00]: And it means that if they ever default to sort of the the old way of thinking or maybe that I needed them to unlearn this new knowledge is also attached to it.
29:06.395 --> 29:08.497
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they might go away to do it.
29:08.597 --> 29:11.298
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, actually, no, I've got to do this other thing too.
29:11.399 --> 29:11.879
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
29:12.559 --> 29:12.779
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
29:12.819 --> 29:16.802
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a really helpful practice that I've extrapolated.
29:23.627 --> 29:46.624
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to go back to the principle around sort of the role of social relationships and learning, and that can be, I guess, more formal mentorships or more informal sort of just relationships with others who are doing similar kinds of work or thinking, I am, again, thinking about our listeners who primarily don't have access to necessarily mentors on the job for those learners.
29:47.585 --> 30:01.785
[SPEAKER_02]: But sort of what can they do still on the social side that might sort of tap into some of those relationships in the way that they can help make sure that the learning gets to take advantage of that importance of the social role in just how we we learn.
30:02.448 --> 30:09.251
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really a fastening thing to me in corporate learning and learning businesses and stuff.
30:09.271 --> 30:19.115
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk a lot about cohort and community, but sometimes we don't actually recognize that it's not just nice and makes the environment great and good for a network.
30:19.395 --> 30:45.802
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, these sorts of features of COVID and community make learning more durable because when we learn things in ways that is through story, that someone else tells us that starts to engage our ability to have empathy, empathy is actually a really if one of the most effective and neurological experiences that we can have to help us reorganize pre-existing mental models.
30:45.822 --> 30:47.803
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to be able to do that much more fluidly.
30:48.283 --> 30:51.365
[SPEAKER_00]: through empathy than in other ways, like without empathy.
30:51.725 --> 31:08.973
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's one example, but there are so many the other things are, you know, by hearing different people's ways of speaking and things like that, we start to be able to sort of start to engage in understanding if there's a language in a discourse of the community that we're trying to be part of.
31:09.473 --> 31:14.015
[SPEAKER_00]: and to speak in their terminology and those things have happened socially and informally.
31:14.575 --> 31:18.717
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a whole discipline of literature.
31:19.097 --> 31:29.362
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say it also goes back like hundreds of years, Vagotski, we don't really believe in that learning was this socio-relational process and it's very true.
31:29.662 --> 31:44.956
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would encourage organizations to think about community and cohorts and things like that, not just in a way of like how do we help them network or how do we make sure that they have what type group to organize drinks or whatever it is.
31:45.316 --> 31:50.781
[SPEAKER_00]: But to think about the design of those as part of learning and essential to learning.
31:51.261 --> 31:52.763
[SPEAKER_00]: So sometimes that means
31:53.363 --> 31:59.429
[SPEAKER_00]: needing to facilitate and model what those interactions need to look like at the beginning.
32:00.030 --> 32:12.201
[SPEAKER_00]: It can mean giving bodies within cohorts that are around affinity, but helping them by structuring the beginning of that relationship so they get used to it and get good at it.
32:12.882 --> 32:35.309
[SPEAKER_00]: It can also mean like simple things like providing individuals opportunities to share their mental models, even if it's not in an effort to like, you're not, you're buddied up, but you're just in a classroom and everyone's sitting there to sort of say this and I'd love it if you could share your mental model of how you're thinking about that thing you just described.
32:35.870 --> 32:37.110
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they do that,
32:40.591 --> 32:42.932
[SPEAKER_00]: that's a socio-relational aspect of learning.
32:43.172 --> 32:44.093
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
32:44.113 --> 33:09.766
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a lot that can be done but thinking about it as a necessary requirement for learning and as a design principle in that way and instead of as I sort of said as just like the community and cohort kind of peace is really important and it changes what you come up with it changes how you think about those experiences in your program and how you value them and the time you give them and the weight you give them.
33:10.808 --> 33:11.809
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that makes a lot of sense.
33:11.829 --> 33:20.453
[SPEAKER_02]: I do feel like sometimes we have this, as you said, this idea of cohorts, but really what it comes down to is it's just the, it's the script of people who happen to be going through the class at the same time.
33:20.513 --> 33:25.056
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you leave it only at that, then it's really not doing the work of the cohorts.
33:25.076 --> 33:35.782
[SPEAKER_02]: So thinking about how to more intentionally create those meaningful exchanges so that, you know, one peer can hear from another how they're thinking about a particular situation or topic, I think is,
33:36.102 --> 33:37.545
[SPEAKER_02]: is incredibly powerful.
33:37.725 --> 33:43.756
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just sort of underline what you're saying about making time for that and making sure that it's part of the design.
33:45.252 --> 33:53.234
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm thinking about listeners who maybe, you know, really are looking to improve their workforce relevant offering.
33:53.254 --> 33:59.815
[SPEAKER_02]: So they have these, you know, courses where they really are trying to make their learners able to do better on the job in the profession.
33:59.835 --> 34:09.858
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're thinking about what they might be able to do in the short term to kind of better align their programs with what you know about how adults actually learn at work.
34:15.739 --> 34:24.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So I definitely think I would be encouraging them to make time in their offerings for learners to be metacognitive.
34:25.062 --> 34:37.147
[SPEAKER_00]: I think often we expect to learn to do that separately, or we know it's nice, but we try to sort of make them do it at the same time as being cognitive, like so you can't
34:38.007 --> 34:44.789
[SPEAKER_00]: Blown something and have cognitive attention to that thing you're learning and be mad at cognitive about it at the same time.
34:44.809 --> 34:58.913
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just not possible and so really making intentional moments for learners to think about things like, right as you enter this experience like what are strategies that you find really helpful to
34:59.893 --> 35:24.733
[SPEAKER_00]: to your learning and your attention, what do you need to do right now to adjust your environment to make sure that you'll like shop in a way that meets your goal for this session, even things like as you're in the middle of the learning environment, inviting learners to surface things that are very clear to them and feel very crystallized, but stuff that still feels very uncertain and they don't feel like they have a complete understanding of yet
35:27.535 --> 35:33.962
[SPEAKER_00]: and help them come up with strategies for how they might adjust what they're, how they're thinking or etc.
35:34.463 --> 35:44.032
[SPEAKER_00]: If they're holding onto something really strongly, which just happens a lot, I think with adult learners, you know, have very deeply automated or scrutinized perspective sometimes.
35:44.813 --> 35:51.497
[SPEAKER_00]: and helping them notice when that's as a result of a bias, and that might be inhibiting them to learn.
35:51.517 --> 35:54.019
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I'm sorry, me and my bias, like a cognitive bias.
35:54.059 --> 36:04.445
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, we as humans succumb to dozens and dozens of cognitive biases every day, and for good reason, they help us use less metabolic energy.
36:04.485 --> 36:05.866
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a really good reason for them.
36:05.886 --> 36:08.788
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want them to go away, but it's really good to notice them.
36:09.168 --> 36:15.329
[SPEAKER_00]: So one might be like, all right, you seem to be, are you resisting the new principles that we're teaching right now?
36:15.869 --> 36:22.011
[SPEAKER_00]: And is that coming from a place of genuine critical thinking and skepticism or is that coming from a place of status quo bias?
36:22.591 --> 36:33.473
[SPEAKER_00]: And is that because right now you're really resistant to this because you feel like the way it's done, the way it's always been done, feels comfortable, it feels easier, it feels like it would take less effort.
36:34.413 --> 36:39.116
[SPEAKER_00]: and that's inhibiting your ability to engage with all that and what we're discussing right now.
36:39.476 --> 36:48.901
[SPEAKER_00]: So inviting sort of these conversations into learning experiences is essential because, you know, what the data on medical mission is.
36:49.581 --> 37:11.887
[SPEAKER_00]: on ambiguous is what I'm going to use in that it results in results in better performance, it results in better durability, it results in better transfer of the skills, like it's the single thing that I would do if I was trying to improve my programming and improve the learnability to apply what they're learning in my context to work.
37:18.702 --> 37:23.824
[SPEAKER_02]: folks who come on the leading learning podcast about their approach to their own ongoing learning.
37:23.844 --> 37:33.287
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would love to hear from you if you have specific habits or practices or sources that you use to continue to grow professionally and if you want also personally.
37:34.087 --> 37:44.673
[SPEAKER_00]: I losing this like funny tension sometimes where I know like things I should do and then I catch myself not doing them and then I get mad at myself like disaster spiral.
37:45.594 --> 38:00.022
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think something that I personally find helpful every so often as an educator is to sometimes intentionally go out and learn something really new and to practice some of the things that I
38:01.283 --> 38:05.506
[SPEAKER_00]: use as educational tools for others or instructional tools for others myself.
38:06.186 --> 38:15.192
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for example, I, this is very esoteric, I apologize, but I'm currently learning to become what's called a champagne specialist.
38:15.953 --> 38:26.960
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's just because I was like, I'm going to go later, that's something that I don't really know a whole lot about, that sort of seems like it would be fun and I was looking for something that had a very social kind of component to it.
38:27.740 --> 38:32.344
[SPEAKER_00]: So I do try to practice these intentional moments of medical ignition myself.
38:32.884 --> 38:38.128
[SPEAKER_00]: I try to think about regulating my own learning like was I paying attention in that class?
38:38.168 --> 38:39.329
[SPEAKER_00]: What was bothering me?
38:39.750 --> 38:42.352
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was I not how I changed that for next time?
38:42.852 --> 38:51.119
[SPEAKER_00]: If I come in next time after having also been tired and frustrated, what are some steps that I could take to adjust how I'm showing up?
38:51.139 --> 38:53.501
[SPEAKER_00]: So I really try to interrogate that.
38:56.168 --> 39:04.770
[SPEAKER_00]: All of this is just to say to you as I think in addition to being really good as being a lifelong learner to have really good awareness of how you learn.
39:05.450 --> 39:16.113
[SPEAKER_00]: As a person, I also think it's really important to for my human standard practice sometimes to remember what it means to be a learner when you're an educator.
39:17.113 --> 39:32.102
[SPEAKER_00]: and to notice what's tick-tricky, what's easy, what are things that you've instruction on where you're doing for a long time that don't actually work, that do work, that you does that make sense, so it can be a good practice.
39:32.722 --> 39:44.591
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's an excellent point about your own continued learning that especially if you are someone who spends a lot of time educating others to put yourself back in the shoes of those folks you're working with.
39:44.611 --> 39:51.497
[SPEAKER_02]: It gives you that empathy which you were talking about earlier is such an important part of how we learn in our narrow plus city piece.
39:52.865 --> 39:56.048
[SPEAKER_02]: So we've covered a bit of ground in our time together today.
39:56.108 --> 40:05.717
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you were to stress a point or two points or three points for listeners, what is it that you are hoping they take away from listening to our conversation?
40:07.135 --> 40:29.205
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think especially for folks who work within the learning businesses, I would be remembering that like what of the five principles even though, you know, one of them is situated that don't walk away from this as saying, oh, we can't do that, remember that you actually have a superpower in terms of your ability to control for the neurobiology.
40:29.905 --> 40:49.299
[SPEAKER_00]: in terms of your ability to expansively frame and in your ability to intentionally craft social relationships that actually is unique and really assetful as compared to learning that sometimes, learning that happens in corporate L and D or in the flow of work context.
40:49.339 --> 40:51.181
[SPEAKER_00]: So please don't at all be disheartened.
40:51.201 --> 40:52.742
[SPEAKER_00]: I just want to really underscore that.
40:53.062 --> 40:55.344
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there are real assets to lean into.
40:56.084 --> 41:13.793
[SPEAKER_00]: That would I think be one, and if I can have a second small one, that is also just to like recognize and cut yourself some slack right now, because learning right now and the world is in such a state of flux and there's so much ambiguity in the business.
41:14.173 --> 41:17.775
[SPEAKER_00]: There's tools that are coming up every day and it feels like if you, you know,
41:18.295 --> 41:26.502
[SPEAKER_00]: haven't read every single New York Times, HBR,acle and tried the three new things that launched last week by 10 AM you're already behind.
41:27.082 --> 41:28.143
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not true.
41:28.243 --> 41:34.288
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the fundamental principles of how humans learn are the same with all without AI.
41:34.848 --> 41:41.634
[SPEAKER_00]: And so just really hold on to the fact that we don't you don't need to get caught in a rack rat race and you're doing well.
41:48.250 --> 41:58.072
[SPEAKER_03]: That wraps up our conversation with Dr. Tessa Forshaw, the cognitive scientist directing the workforce learning and innovation initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
41:58.652 --> 42:00.132
[SPEAKER_03]: Stay with us for our recap.
42:00.452 --> 42:15.935
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll find show notes in a transcript for this episode at leadinglearning.com slash episode for eight zero along with links to Tessa's profile on LinkedIn and where you can learn more about the initiative and the certificate program in workforce and workplace learning.
42:16.675 --> 42:20.236
[SPEAKER_03]: If you found this episode valuable, we'd be grateful if you'd share it.
42:20.656 --> 42:25.417
[SPEAKER_03]: That helps more people benefit from the conversation and it supports the work we do with the podcast.
42:26.177 --> 42:30.577
[SPEAKER_01]: Tessa opened our conversation by reframing what learning actually is.
42:31.017 --> 42:37.859
[SPEAKER_01]: Not content delivery, but a neurobiological process shaped by brain chemistry, hormones, and environment.
42:38.659 --> 42:42.779
[SPEAKER_01]: And that shift in perspective is the foundation of five principles for
42:45.880 --> 42:58.545
[SPEAKER_03]: Those principles that learning is biological, social, situated and requires effort and must transfer give learning designers a science-based lens for evaluating and improving their programs.
42:59.265 --> 43:06.948
[SPEAKER_01]: And she left us with a clear and actually quite easy to implement to make intentional space for metacognition in your programs.
43:07.449 --> 43:09.669
[SPEAKER_01]: The data she says is unambiguous.
43:09.970 --> 43:10.590
[SPEAKER_01]: When learners have
43:14.052 --> 43:17.640
[SPEAKER_01]: then performance, durability, and transfer all improve.
43:18.242 --> 43:19.244
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks again for listening.
43:19.545 --> 43:21.930
[SPEAKER_03]: See you next time on the leading learning podcast.
