Keep Those Examples!
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When you're working on converting a face to face live class into something that's online or maybe even flipped, often you're aware of the importance of presenting the material in smaller chunks and trying not to have big long videos. So what happens is you end up trying to distill the information down to what's most essential. And you strip out the extraneous parts, right? But what about the examples? Please don't take them out. They're not extraneous and they're what people remember after a lecture. The stories or the examples, are the stuff that make it come alive. It's what makes it stick. The use of examples of scenarios aligns while to multiple learning theories. So let's first look at cognitivism. Cognitivism sees the brain much like a computer. And the computer already has some data in it and that's your current understanding of the world, it's what you already know. Then the new information or what the learning is supposed to be about enters your brain. The learning happens when that new information gets pieced together by your brain with the old information, It's when the two are fit together. So that result of the new and the old fitting together in your brain is what learning is. And when you share examples are when you ask your participants to share examples, it helps them process the new information in light of what they already know in light of their life experiences. It links the new to the existing. In the theory of constructivism, learning is created, it's constructed. So that means the teacher is presenting concepts, but what's actually taken away or learned is really dependent on the learner. Learning as seen as an active social and personal process. And when you share experience or give examples or tell stories, or when you ask participants to do these things, it also helps the learner develop their own meaning, their own interpretation for the material. Finally, we remember things that tap into our emotions. That's why you remember what you were doing when something really wonderful, or really terrible happened. So for example, I was preparing to teach 9AM ESL class at MSU when I learned that the Twin Towers collapsed. And I was in the prep room and there was a TV on and I just saw it and I remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing, and what class I was about to teach. In contrast, when I realized that I was pregnant with my first child, I can tell you exactly where I was and where I was standing. And that's because even though maybe it's a mundane activity that's happening at the time that you get this exciting or terrible news. There's emotion associated with it. So those memory stick and stories and examples capitalize on this. They help you remember things. And finally, adults need to really see how what they're learning matters in the real world. Examples and stories create that link between theory and reality. They also tend to be engaging and motivating. So here's your summary, examples and stories helped by connecting new materials to our current knowledge of the world. They helped by tapping into the individual's personal meaning of the material. And they also connect to emotion, which makes it stick.