Long-term retention teaching styles

Helping your audience remember what you’ve taught them is yet another challenge for speakers and presenters. Too often, learning is gauged based on written and oral tests rather than on how well they understood the subject as by applying the learning to their daily lives.

The ultimate measure of true learning should be their ability to translate the learning experience into their daily lives.

THINKING

ACTIVITIES

After a presentation, try to reinforce the audience’s understanding of what you have presented. Walk the extra mile and ensure that your audience has learned.

In preparing a presentation, it would be good for you to leave some time for such deep-thinking or “interactive” reinforcing strategies.

• DISCUSSIONS. Let the audience re-state the learning in their own words.

• DEMONSTRATION. Discuss the learning without imposing boundaries.

• DEBATE. Provide counter-arguments to the learning and let them debate on it.

• DISCOVERY. Make an abstract of the learning or solutions to problems.

• INTERVIEW. Review the topic or preview the next one.

• BRAINSTORMING. Generate samples of the learning and sort them.

• FEEDBACK. Predict possible short and long term consequences of the learning.

• EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING. Encourage them to apply the learning to their real life situations.

AIDS TO RECALL

• Here are strategies which can aid the audience in retaining and recalling the lessons learned.

• Expose the audience to the lessons to be learned in advance.

• Let members of the audience become presenters.

• Use role-play to make learning engaging.

• Ask participants to form small groups in which they could evaluate key ideas.

• Use flash cards for review.

• Post key ideas on the board.

• Let participants make posters.

MAKING THE PRESENTATION STICK

If you want people to retain what you have lectured on, then do it with your students’ perceptual strengths in mind. Why?

Auditory learners remember 75 percent of what they hear in a normal 40-50 minute lecture. Only 30 percent of the population appears to be auditory. It is the most difficult way for many people to remember new and demanding information. Visual learners remember 75 percent of what they read and see.

Approximately 40 percent of the population is visual, but that number is divided into analytics and globals, with different percentages existing at different age levels.

Tactual learners remember what they write (if analytic) or draw or doodle (if global). Kinesthetic learners remember best the things they experience. Kinesthetics must be actively involved in going, doing, traveling, acting, and on-the-job training.

Young children tend to be highly tactual and or kinesthetic, but many adults remain that way. Some add visual and auditory strengths as they grow older; others do not.

Think up activities that appeal to your audience’s perceptual strengths!

The levels of processing theory have provided some research that attest to the fact that we “know” more than we can easily recall. There are several examples of elaboration that are commonly used in the teaching/learning process:

• Imaging — creating a mental picture

• Method of loci (locations) — ideas or things to be remembered are connected to objects located in a familiar location

• Pegword method (number, rhyming schemes) — ideas or things to be remembered are connected to specific words (e.g., one-bun, two-shoe, three-tree, etc.)

• Rhyming (songs, phrases) — information to be remembered is arranged in a rhyme (e.g., 30 days hath September, April, June, and November, etc.)

• Initial letter — the first letter of each word in a list is used to make a sentence (the sillier, the better).

Breakthrough Education

By HENRY S. TENEDERO
MB.COM.PH

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