Learning science meets practice

Icebreaker

The Human Learning Gallery

Two careers, two starting points, and the same conclusion about learners.

1. 1Label four areas: structure, discussion, practice, reflection. One question: think of something you learned well, and what made it land?
2. 2Stand at your answer. Two minutes in that group on what helps you engage and what blocks you.
3. 3Agree one sentence each: we learn best when. Say it to the room, with one thing that makes learning harder.
4. 4Look at the four answers, then ask why it matters that one author came from education and the other from workplace training.

Working on your own? Answer all four, then decide which one your own sessions are built around. Most trainers design for the way they themselves learn.

Icebreaker

Evidence Before Identity

Reconstruct two people from fragments, then find out how close you were.

1. 1Put one clue on each card: decades in school leadership / years in leadership development / grounded in theory and learning science / grounded in practical workplace performance / experience from classrooms to boardrooms / known for turning learning into behaviour in complex organisations / both reject treating learners as one group / both ask what makes learning actually work.
2. 2Shuffle them and sort into three piles. You are not told what the piles are.
3. 3From the evidence alone, say what each background is, what problem these two are responding to, and what principle links them.
4. 4Then read the chapter and check how close you got.

Working on your own? Sort the clues before reading, then mark which inference you got wrong. The gap is usually the shared philosophy rather than the two backgrounds.

Icebreaker

Fix the Failed Session

The content was good, so the session should have worked.

1. 1Here is the session. Forty-five minutes to a mixed group, dense slides, long explanation, no adaptation. Some lost focus, some could not see the point, some wanted to talk it through, some wanted to try it.
2. 2In pairs, name the main problem and the wrong assumption behind the trainer’s verdict.
3. 3Produce three fixes, each finishing the line: to improve this session, we would.
4. 4Then read the chapter and say which fix came from a classroom instinct and which came from a workplace one.

Working on your own? Write your three fixes, then ask which of your own sessions the scenario resembles. Most trainers recognise it, which is why the chapter opens where it does.

Journaling

Why These Authors, Why This Book

A biography placed before the argument is doing work. Find out what.

1. 1Write what each author contributes that the other cannot, using details from the chapter rather than impressions.
2. 2Name the shared conviction underneath both careers, in one sentence.
3. 3Answer the real question: why open a book like this with who the authors are, instead of with the argument itself?
4. 4Finish on the belief they share. What does designing for the learner’s cognitive reality mean to you, as someone who has been taught badly at least once?

Working with a group? Compare only the one-sentence version of the shared conviction. Twelve attempts at it will expose whether the chapter actually makes its case.

Problem solving

Why These Two Authors

A publisher asks why readers should trust this book. Answer from the chapter.

1. 1List what each author brings: the settings they worked in, what they would have seen go wrong, and the kind of authority that gives them.
2. 2Say what would have been strong but incomplete if either had written it alone.
3. 3Take a trainer who says the material was clear, so disengagement is the learners’ problem. Why would both authors reject that, and for different reasons?
4. 4Write the recommendation. Why does this section strengthen the book before the argument starts?

Working with a group? Split the room in two, one author each, and have both sides answer the trainer’s claim. The two rejections should not sound the same.

Worksheet

Credibility or Evidence

Experience makes a case worth hearing. It does not make it correct.

1. 1Read Approach A. Tim Dingle brings education, school leadership and learning science, and decades of watching learning succeed and fail in formal settings. The authority is long observation and research. It establishes why something should work and under what conditions it does not.
2. 2Read Approach B. Tony Walmsley brings leadership development and organisational training, where learning has to turn into behaviour against real deadlines and competing priorities. The authority is applied. It establishes what survives contact with an actual workplace.
3. 3Compare them: what each one is in a position to claim; what kind of credibility each brings; where their experience genuinely overlaps; what each would notice first in a failing session.
4. 4Critique both. What does research-grounded authority settle? Where does long observation stop being proof? What does applied experience demonstrate that research cannot? When is practice just a longer habit?
5. 5Make a judgement. A strong author biography does not prove a training philosophy is correct. Say how far that holds, what this section does prove, and what it only implies. Finish the sentence: After reading this, what I would still want evidence for is…