‘Attention – the prerequisite for successful learning’ by Christopher Ball, page 45 Training Journal, January 2009

Though this article is not aimed primarily at management audiences, it does provide a lot of insight that is relevant. Indeed, having read many articles about the way children learn over the years, it is interesting how many parallels there are to managers, even senior ones!!

The author starts by making the obvious but important point that learning depends on attention and that telling stories is one way of ensuring that attention is initially secured. He then goes on to rather disprove his point by telling several stories that go on rather too long. Perhaps he should have said ‘stories of the right length’.

Nevertheless it is worth persevering because the article goes on to suggest that attention is closely related to confidence and motivation and that, without these, individuals will create their own ‘roadblocks’ to learning. He suggests a vicious circle whereby lack of confidence destroys motivation, lack of motivation destroys attention and lack of attention destroys learning.

This leads to what the author calls ‘learned helplessness’ and though the examples quoted are about the learning of maths at school, all of us at MTP would recognise similar symptoms from some high level managers when attempting to learn about finance. They convince themselves before the course that they can’t do it and this means that they don’t even try to learn. Our solutions are similar to those in the article, to convince the audience that the subject is less complex than they thought and increase their confidence by a range of learning strategies.

The article suggests five criteria for these strategies all conveniently beginning with ‘C’; the audience should be comfortable, confident, able to make choices, challenged and able to see clearly what success means. Stories are again important here, as are analogies to everyday life. And even more important is a facilitator with the warmth and sensitivity to make the learners feel relaxed enough to remove the blocks. It is often the knowledge that others in similar positions have the same lack of confidence and a belief that the trainer is there to help them, that enables the barriers to be overcome.

The article is worthwhile reading for the learning professional, even if it will probably only reinforce existing beliefs in most cases. However you may want to skip some of the stories and self serving personal references.



To access this article go to http://www.trainingjournal.com/tj/1883.html