Five Principles of Brain Friendly Learning
March 3rd, 2009
- Keep it real – Making sure that there are real personal and business benefits that follow the learning event.
- Facilitate creation not consumption – Make the materials experience based, not materials based. The menu is not the meal, the course manual is not the experience.
- Honour uniqueness – There are many ways of finding an answer to a problem; the way you choose to tackle it is the way you like to process information. There are many different ways and methods people process information, our participants are unique individuals – we need to honour that.
- Make it rich and multi sensory – The brain does not work the same way as a computer, when you input data into a computer; you only need to do it once. When you input data into the human brain, it will not necessarily be recorded accurately the first time. If you give computer information with gaps, it just remains ignorant of the information you failed to supply. If you give human brain information with gaps, it tends to fill in the gaps, make things up. We need to cross check the levels of accuracy provided to the gaps of our human participants.
- State is everything – All learning is state dependant. Emotions cause the brain to release neurotransmitters that aid memory retention. The content of the ‘memory’ will become neurologically associated with the ‘feeling’. Being in the right state of mind – positive towards the learning experience is essential.
