We are redeveloping our NLP Practitioner course this month. The change has been in the works, gradually, for the past year. Now the hard work comes of building the existing blocks into something new.
We’re changing for three reasons. The first is simply that we don’t feel we can teach people to make change happen unless we are making change happen in and for our own community. We need to walk our talk. The second is that we need to help people understand what we do in our courses. It’s not enough to speak marketing or to speak NLP, we need to use language that is both familiar and meaningful to everyone who comes looking for something at NLP Canada Training. And the third is that the science of learning has changed over the past twenty years. It’s not enough to train as we were trained. We need to train the way the brain learns.
The research on learning is mostly the opposite of the way training and education has been working. The first key to learning efficiently is that you have to struggle. If everything is made perfectly clear, you’re not understanding something new and you’ll likely forget much of what was taught as soon as the course ends. This is a little discouraging for teachers who have been either working very hard to make things clear and straightforward or who have been dealing with criticism for making students do the hard work so they learn. Yes, this is especially true in the world of corporate training, where you don’t get great evaluations by making people stretch.
The other research that changes the way we teach says that people acquire new skills and information better with interleaved practice: that means doing a bit of one thing and then a bit of another, and then returning to the first. It’s the opposite of the intensive courses that easily fit into schedules: you take one day to learn and practice a new skill all at once. It’s also different than the way we have been building NLP courses, focusing on one core skill at a time.
What’s the alternative? We’ll be posting updates over the next month. Essentially, we’re looking at ways to deliberate intersperse core skills while making it easier for people to see how to apply those skills outside the training room. I know, you’ve heard that before. And you’ll hear it again. As knowledge and circumstances change, we will continue to change the way we teach. But the objectives will always be to craft courses that allow for the best learning in the time available. And the best learning is the learning that people put to work in their lives.
