Using Accelerated Learning Techniques

• Increase the speed of your participants' learning
• Introduce your participants to new ways of learning
• Enhance your learners' experiences in the classroom
• Learn how to engage your learners' minds and bodies in the learning process
• Make your training sessions enjoyable, memorable and effective
• Learn how to use colour, music, games and physical activities in your training sessions.

There are supportive 'trainer tips' at the end of each activity to help you make the very most of each exercise and to help you anticipate how your participants will react.

List of Activities:

1.  Understanding Accelerated Learning

What exactly is Accelerated Learning? How can you use it to enhance your learners’ experiences in the classroom? An explanation of the spirit of Accelerated Learning and how and why it works is given. This unit will help you to understand why, when and how to apply simple Accelerated Learning techniques.

2.  Developing total learner involvement

What engages learners in the act of learning? How can you ensure that learners take responsibility for their own learning experience? How can you design activity-centred learning events that will guarantee learning? This unit looks at the nine
intelligences defined as part of Accelerated Learning in general terms, and will enable you to apply them to any training event.

3.  Using Accelerated Learning principles

This will give you an overview of the types of courses where the activities could be used. It is a list of suggestions and is far from exhaustive. As you become more familiar with Accelerated Learning activities, you will find yourself developing your own ideas and finding other uses for these activities. Where appropriate, descriptions identify possible difficulties, potential questions and possible dangers, as well as how to deal with them.

4.  The training environment and the toy box

If you introduce colour, props and interesting gadgets to fiddle with and to use in exercises, you will encourage learners to think ‘out of the box’ and use other parts of their brain. This unit will help you develop a ‘toy box’ which can be used to enhance your training.

5.  Facilitating groups

Facilitation of groups to achieve specific outcomes can often be the most difficult thing you have to cope with. A number of people with different ideas can result in a discussion of minutiae instead of the development of an overall view and action plan. Using these Accelerated Learning techniques will help you ensure that a result is achieved in half the usual time.

6.  Breathing new life into ‘Death by PowerPoint®’

Overhead projection and PowerPoint® presentations have their place; however, words are not enough to ensure that learning takes place. Images give richer and more lasting experiences. With the right presentation, you will create an experience for the participants that they will never forget.

SECTION TWO: THE ACTIVITIES

7.  Using music

Developing functional teams

You can use music to improve the learning experience, open the mind and create positive feelings to help participants absorb information better. Music can be used before, during and after events. This activity is designed for use with a session on team building; it uses music to create a better learning environment and assist in accelerating the learning process.

8. Telling stories

Understanding a process

Stories are often used to make abstract concepts more concrete, to make them easier to memorise. Making a process into a story not only makes it more fun to learn, it also relieves the tediousness often experienced by those being taught. This activity uses storytelling to teach a process and make it
fun.

9. Getting them moving

The reality of customer care
Accelerated Learning practitioners understand that moving around, both inside and outside, increases and enhances the learning experience. Use the principle in this activity to develop customer care skills.

10. Creating mystery and intrigue, and prizes

Communicating for successful management relationships

People enjoy something that engages their imagination by being different. Turn the training event into a ‘mystery’, where the participants have to gather certain bits of information and learning to win the prize. Creating a game based on the required learning helps to take away the ‘ordinariness’ of a training event, and a prize introduces an element of challenge. This activity uses a mystery to teach communication skills to the learners.

11. Introducing a theme

Successful change management

For many years, trainers have used analogies to encourage understanding and memory. Using an imaginary scenario to illustrate the event makes the experience one that the participants will not forget, and they will be able to recall and apply the main learning points until they become a habit. This activity, based on a cruise, takes learners through the seas of change to learn about change management.

12. Using characterisation

Creative problem solving

This activity is a way of using the essence of role-play without the discomfort. By taking characters from a well-known film or book and using their characteristics to apply to a problem or challenge, you can help participants to understand the problem from a number of different perspectives and to create solutions that might not otherwise have been found.

13. Using fiction

Objective job descriptions and person specifications

When a learner is given a case study which involves a real-life scenario, it is sometimes difficult for them to apply a new way of thinking and to come up with new approaches. By using fictional characters and developing job descriptions and person specifications for them, participants learn how to do this for real when they return to work.

14. Creating analogies

How quickly time passes!

This subject is one that you will probably teach on a regular basis. It is sometimes difficult to think of new ways of putting across a subject that will be interesting and ensure that you remain engaged with the subject. Using these techniques to illustrate time management will engage the senses and other intelligences of the participants, leaving them stimulated and ready to apply what they have learnt back in the workplace.

15. Using yourself as a role-model

Demonstrating exceptional customer care

Customer Care is another course you probably teach on a regular basis. Revitalise your course and enjoy yourself, by introducing these Accelerated Learning principles to give the learners an experience that will change the way they deal with customers for ever.

16. Maximising individual learning strengths

Learning about assertiveness

In this activity, you demonstrate how the Multiple Intelligences of Accelerated Learning can be used to increase an individual’s learning ability. Understanding that they absorb knowledge in different ways helps individuals to understand more about themselves and they are then able to apply this new understanding to their work and personal life.

17. Redesigning a process

Changing ways of undertaking a process

Using the Accelerated Learning principles involving physical activity and drawing pictograms will help to get participants on board. They will produce results that can be put into practice to change and update processes.

18. Harnessing environmental intelligence

Understanding appraisals

None of us can help sometimes just gazing out of the window! Harness participants’ environmental intelligence by taking the activity outside and learning about appraisals from being out of doors.

19. Appealing to learning preferences

Learning to listen

This activity appeals to people with strong verbal, linguistic and mathematical skills. It provides an activity for participants that is fun, informative and will teach them about listening skills.

20. Creating anticipation

Anticipating an effective learning event

What are the participants’ expectations when they arrive for a training event? How can you ensure that they arrive with the enthusiasm and interest which will switch them on to learning from the beginning? Creating an air of anticipation can help to ensure that you have their attention even before the training begins. This activity has been designed to create that anticipation and to help participants understand what learning is all about.