Variety Beats SamenessVariety Beats Sameness

It’s said that,

Variety is the spice of life

I’d add, “and is key to learning”

Think about what you give your attention to and when your mind starts to wander. We tend to give our attention to:

“Any stimuli introduced into our immediate environment, which is either new (novel) or of sufficiently strong emotional intensity (high contrast), will immediately gain our attention.” – Eric Jensen

In other words, during a workshop, if the only tools we have are lecture and PowerPoint, or role-play followed by role-play followed by role-play, we aren’t going to hold the attention of our learners for very long. Without their attention, the transfer of learning is unlikely to take place.

Within our workshops, I would suggest that we need to change something every 7-minutes (every 4-minutes for webinar or eLearning). This doesn’t mean the content needs to be only 7-minutes, but the rate of change needs to be around every 7-minutes.

Here are some suggestions to add variety into your workshops:

Practical Application

• Ask learners to generate 3 questions based upon the current content to challenge another team and then facilitate the quiz.
• Ask learners to research a topic and create a News Article based upon their findings.
• Use different parts of the room/building to offer content ie have learners join you around a set of flip charts and present the learning at that location.
• Ask teams to form a series of questions about a topic and then have them interview you rather than you just presenting the information.
• Include field trip (which could be internal ie visiting another department to build upon the current content).
• Use teaching props ie things that demonstrate a key point which could be physical equipment or things like magic tricks which helps learners visualises a key point.
• Change who learners partner up with each time you ask them to work in pairs.
• Ask learners to work in teams and create mindmaps about what they currently know or what they learned about the current content. This could be done using the walls in the corridor.

Additional Research

• Eric Jensen – Brain Based Learning (book)
• Baron, Jonathan. (2000). Thinking and Deciding