Cartoon drawn by cartoonist Keira Menon
When we get into a learning situation, we’re usually excited.
Then, almost immediately we feel unsure. We stumble along, not keen to move ahead.
What’s happening in our brain?
I’ll tell you what: a pain map is being created. This pain map is because of a lack of good instructional design. How do we avoid creating this pain map for our kids and especially for our clients?
Let’s find out in this article.
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My wife, Renuka, has always loved the rain. Not so much any more.
It all came down to a single event: in the summer of 2023. We had been through almost seven months of nonstop rain. We were in the dry season it was still bucketing down in torrents.
However, this particular storm wasn't just passing through. It lingered overhead for hours. At first, as the water accumulated in the garden, we were excited. We took pictures, even some videos. However, as the water level kept rising, we started to worry.
After an hour, the garden filled with water.
It rose to the level of the steps, then above that level, and finally, it was like we were marooned in our own house. There was a moat around us, and we had no idea when or whether it would stop raining.
This event caused Renuka to fear a significant amount of anxiety. This particular storm had left such a scary imprint that even the smallest amount of precipitation would give her the jitters.
It's been a year and a bit since that storm.
Renuka no longer has anxiety about the rain. The pain that she felt has been minimised. Because the storms didn't recur, it wasn't an ongoing pain. Once that pain had enough time to heal, it disappeared. The excitement of a rainy day is back.
Something similar happens when we initiate the learning process for our clients.
Clients start most learning with excitement. Then, they hit the first storm and feel stressed out. Suddenly, the learning experience has turned into a series of storms. These storms recur with furious intensity, creating a permanent pain map in the learner's brain.
Learning then becomes an edgy experience. It rattles the learners, and they feel unsafe and unconfident a lot of the time. However, learning shouldn't be this way. It should be a fun experience and never painful.
What causes this pain map, and how can we (as trainers) overcome these stormy situations? In this episode, we'll look at three slightly unusual areas that cause pain and how we, as teachers, can prevent the pain map from occurring at all.
The three elements we're going to cover are:
1) The loneliness of learning
2) Why deconstruction is more crucial than just another assignment.
3) Why it’s crucial to pace learning
1) The loneliness of learning
“Everyone is better than me!”
I was in Spain, participating in a watercolour workshop and I looked around the room. Everyone seemed to know what to do with their easel. They knew how to prime their paper, and all of them seemed to have an array of brushes. Me, I was just standing around looking like a royal doofus.
This feeling of being inadequate is common among all learners.
The primary reason why we go to a class, or do a course is because we need to improve our skill. We also need to feel confident that we can not only understand, but apply our learning to some degree. Yet, the moment we step into a learning situation, it feels like going back to school.
What's so bad about school, you may ask?
Think about how you did any test or exam at school. You were given the questions and had to answer them to the best of your ability. So far, so good, but if you didn't know a lot about the subject matter, it would feel like everyone else was somehow confident and skilled, while you were the doofus. Not just a doofus, but a royal one, too.
That's when things went from bad to worse.
You submitted your test, and only the teacher was allowed to see what you'd submitted. You weren't allowed to look at how the others tackled the very same assignment. How could you? Every student is treated like an island.
No one gets to see the work of others, or learn from another. Your doofus level reaches a pain situation. It makes you feel like you're doing something wrong, when in reality it's the system that's all out of whack. This is why one of the most important goals is to create a learning safe space.
How do you go about creating a safe space?
You take the loneliness out of learning by creating a group. This “group” isn't just some new-fangled “cohort learning”. You're not lumping a whole bunch of people together to fend for themselves. Instead, your job as a trainer is to get about 5-7 people to know each other very well.
In a live workshop, this may take a fair amount of time.
You may need to have a meet and greet the night before and go to dinner. Then, the next day, you may need to spend at least two hours in some activity that has absolutely nothing to do with what you're planning to teach. In an online course, you might need to have low-risk, super easy assignments for an entire week.
This allows the group to quickly finish their work and then go around getting to know each other. In fact, part of your job as a trainer is to get them to mingle so that they feel comfortable in the group. They get to understand each other's personality, tone etc, and learn a bit about what the other person does for a living.
None of this activity is focused on the skill itself.
No matter whether you're teaching cooking or copywriting, the goal should always be to create little group silos. In a Psychotactics course or workshop, for example, we may start out with 20 clients, but then we further segregate them into smaller groups of four or five. It's not as if we always followed this method.
At one point, early in our teaching journey, we were happy to call it a group and throw everyone together in one big crowd. Of course, the bigger the crowd, the more lonely and terrified you're likely to feel. You can't get to know everyone, and because there's no clear silo, you stay isolated.
Learning is about being in a safe space–first and last
If I were in a small group in the watercolour class, and I'd spent the night before drinking sangria and eating tapas, I might have acted differently. Instead of being like a deer in the headlights, I would have turned to a “friend” and instantly been able to move ahead. Furthermore, when the group started to work on a project, it would not end up being a state secret.
I would be able to see how the others tackled the assignment, and that would get me quickly out of my funk zone. Most importantly, I'd have realised that everyone was in the same leaky boat. That were were indeed all beginners, learning the skill, and I'd have not felt the doofus halo on my head.
When we learn, we build a map of pain
If we progress quickly through the early stages, we feel emboldened. However, if we are alone and expected to figure out our journey, we almost certainly fall into the gutter. And why not? We join a course because we are hopeless at something.
We don't join because we're already spectacular at the skill. Which is why the group must be put together, and the group must be small, and well selected.
Instead of a pain map, what we develop is a fun map.
We feel like coming back to learn, and feel excited by the progress we're making.Which means that creating and getting the group members to work together is the starting point of any learning program. It's time to move forward into the deep end, right?
Not really. Learning doesn't have to be hard, and shouldn't be, especially at the very beginning. You can learn a lot from doing not a lot. This takes us to the second point of the early learning process. A concept called “deconstruction”.
2) Why deconstruction is superior to rushing into assignments
“I'm writing a novel,” said the woman sitting beside me in the restaurant.
We were on holiday and at breakfast when we started talking to the guests at an adjoining table. “I'm writing a book”, said the woman. I nodded and asked her about the book and if she had a “villain”.
What's a villain? she asked.
I explained that a novel—or any story—doesn't have legs unless it runs into a problem. Hence, if there's a hero to the story, there needs to be a villain. Once she heard my comment, she was pretty energised. “I'm going back to my room and add a villain,” she said.
“I think that's a bad idea”, I said softly.
I told her that her next step would be to read 10 or 20 books and look for the villain. When does the villain show up? How much damage does he create? How does the hero overcome the problem? “Your next task isn't to write, but instead to read.
In other words, her brief was to deconstruct.
As trainers, one of our main tasks is getting people to complete an assignment. If you're teaching someone how to cook, you may want them to immediately start the dish. Yet, everyone who learns something new is completely at sea. Just like I was unsure what to do in that watercolour class in Spain, the learner isn't sure what move to make next.
The next move shouldn't be to build anything but to take things apart.
The woman who was writing the novel didn't need to write anything at all. Instead, she needed to read, listen, or watch. She needed a very low-stress activity and still felt like she was making progress. This low-stress deconstruction activity is crucial because it helps avoid a pain map.
When learning just about anything, we create a series of pain points.
We stumble over the most minor hurdle and see ourselves as not good enough. We primarily join a course, train, or even ask for help because we need a system. Yet, the system is often poorly designed. Instead of getting the learner to do something, we must first get them to recognise and deconstruct.
In the storytelling course at Psychotactics, the clients don't necessarily launch into writing stories.
Instead, they're given a concept: “ups and downs”. They're told that a story isn't a story until it has challenges and possibly some winning moments. Then, instead of writing stories, they simply read a story or watch a short video.
They're in deconstruction mode.
They get to see the pattern and analyse when things are going well and when they're not. However, there's little or no pain involved in the assignment. Without pain, the pain map doesn't increase.
On the other hand, if they're instantly thrown into the deep end of writing stories, they experience an instant feeling of anxiety. The pain map, it seems, isn't so hard to create, and the joy of learning is ripped apart and replaced with fear.
Deconstruction is the way to go, isn't it?
Not only is the client doing a relatively pain-free task, but they're also not alone. They're in a group of 5-7 people they already know well. They can see what the others have done and comment on or praise the work of their group mates.
Suddenly, we have reduced two big points of pain: the pain of working “alone” and the nuisance of having to take a giant step and get an assignment done. Deconstruction has given them the necessary momentum, but that's not enough.
At this point, things need to slow down considerably. This is where pacing comes into play.
3) Why it’s crucial to pace learning
I once heard a fascinating bit of information from a neuroscientist.
According to her research, we can only absorb a limited amount of information per day. This information is stored in our short-term memory, which is then transferred into long-term memory. Even the transfer itself is fraught with hurdles. If we don’t sleep well enough or long enough, there is a fair bit of dropout in the transfer process.
When a client learns something, there’s a good chance that they have a high dropout rate.
Because it’s impossible to measure dropout of any kind, let’s adopt an irrationally high figure. Let’s say the client has transferred 10% of the information. If we move at a snail’s pace, the client will have roughly 50% of the information in place.
It’s when we should be moving to the next concept in the learning, right?
Surely 50% is high enough. Who cares about the rest of the 50%? Isn’t it more important to focus on the syllabus instead? So much to do, so little time, blah, blah. Just reading the last few lines alone would have created a pain in your brain. When your learning is incomplete, you have the feeling of always being lost.
There’s an uneasy sensation of being in catch-up mode. The pain map continues to expand, and you reach for the dunce cap, assuring yourself that you were never talented in the first place.
When you feel pain, you want to get rid of the feeling.
Yet, this problem can be eased if pace is integral to the teaching process. When conducting courses, we find that clients may struggle a bit as the week progresses. Saturday drops, and so does Sunday. When they come back and tackle a second week, they seem to be moving ahead more briskly.
It’s not like any instruction was given on the weekend. No extra homework or reading is allocated. Instead, what’s taken into consideration is the advice of the neuroscientist.
Day after day, the client can transfer chunks of learning to long-term memory.
By the time the weekend shows up, the learner may have a grasp of over 50% of the information—or maybe even less. Nonetheless, the brain relaxes, and the following week allows the learner to start not at 0% but instead at 25 or even 50%. Yes, they still have a long way to go because it’s possible that even with another week allocated to the concept, they may still progress slowly.
It’s not the syllabus that’s a problem; it’s the instructional design that’s out of whack.
If your design considers that people don’t remember most of what they learn, you will assume they get to 50% or lower within a week. You will also understand that no one will make it to 100% by the end of the second week, but the additional space will keep them in a safe zone.
Shouldn’t you then allocate a third week to learn the concept altogether?
Much of what you’re teaching depends on the time you have at your disposal. Plus, a third week of doing the same task can lead to a different kind of pain, namely boredom. It’s not like you’ve completely dropped the concept, either. You can add it as a layer for the following week. For instance, let’s look at the progress using the alphabet.
Week 1: A1
Week 2: A2
Week 3: A1 + A2 + B1
Week 4: A1 + A2 + B1 + B2
When learning is built in this paced method, there’s also a sort of layering that occurs.
The learner may finally get to 100% of A by the end of Week 4. However, because there’s a lot of space to let the concepts sink in, the client is better placed to understand and implement the idea. More importantly, they don’t feel as much pain. They believe they can be talented in almost any field, provided the instructional design is well executed.
It’s important to understand that all pain is real.
Even if the pain is in your head, the brain seems to make no distinction between structural pain and any other pain. However, most of our learning problems occur from terrible teaching structures.
It’s why we buy one course, then jump to another and another. It’s not that we have the attention span of a butterfly. Instead, all of this jumping around is because the instructional design is based on an information dump. Instead of paying attention to how the brain processes and implements things, we are simply faced with endless information.
Information is painful. Tiring too!
This is why your kid isn’t always a fan of learning, and it’s why clients struggle through most learning as well. Pain can be reduced, especially at the starting stage, which is the most difficult of all.
Are these the only ways to reduce the pain map of learning? Not at all. Many steps are needed to make the journey more fun for the learner. However, these three steps alone will make a considerable difference in reducing the pain of learning.
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