Accelerated Learning Techniques
Accelerated Learning is the most advanced teaching and learning methodology used today. It is a system for enhancing the speed at which information is absorbed by addressing both the learning environment and the programme design process.
Research shows that learning effectiveness is increased considerably, protecting your investment in your own or your employee's training.
Accelerated Learning unlocks more of our potential for learning by actively involving the whole person using physical activity, mental creativity, music, images, colour and other methods designed to increase the depth of involvement and engagement that the delegate feels in their own learning.
Elements of an Accelerated Learning Environment
A Positive Learning Environment
People learn best in a positive emotional and social environment that is both relaxed and stimulating. A sense of wholeness, safety, interest and enjoyment is essential for learning optimisation.
Total Learner Involvement
People learn best when they are actively involved and take responsibility for their own learning. Knowledge is something a learner actively creates through activity-based interventions rather than materials or presentation-based delivery.
Collaboration Among Learners
People generally learn best in an environment of collaboration. All good learning tends to be social. In preference to isolated learning the emphasis is on collaboration between learners in a learning community.
Variety That Appeals To All Styles
People learn best when they have a rich variety of learning options that allows them to use all of their senses and exercise their preferred learning style.
Contextual Learning
People learn best within the context of their own paradigms. The Accelerated Learning approach uses a process of real-world immersion, feedback, reflection, evaluation, and re-immersion.
Seven Principles of Accelerated Learning
1. Learning Involves the Whole Being. Learning is not merely “head” learning (conscious, rational, “left-brained” and verbal), rather involves the whole 'body/mind' with all its emotions, biochemistry, senses and receptors.
2. Learning is Creation, Not Consumption. Knowledge is not something a learner absorbs, but something a learner creates. Learning happens when a learner integrates new knowledge and skill personally. Learning is a matter of creating new meanings, new neural networks and pathways and new patterns of electro-chemical interactions.
3. Collaboration Aids Learning. All good learning has a social base. We often learn more by interacting with peers than we learn by any other means. Competition between learners slows learning. Cooperation among learners speeds it.
4. Learning Takes Place on Many Levels Simultaneously. Learning is not a matter of absorbing one thing at a time in a linear fashion, rather absorbing multiple elements simultaneously, using all the receptors, senses and paths. The brain is an extermely capable parallel processing centre and thrives when challenged to do many things at once.
5. Learning Comes From Doing the Work Itself (With Feedback). People learn best in context. Things learned in isolation are hard to remember and quick to evaporate. We learn how to swim by swimming, how to manage by managing, how to sing by singing, how to sell by selling. The real and the concrete are far better teachers than the hypothetical and the abstract, provided there is time for total immersion, feedback, reflection, and reimmersion coupled with repeated use of the new capability.
6. Positive Emotions Greatly Improve Learning. Feelings determine both the quality and quantity of one’s learning. Negative feelings inhibit learning. Positive feelings accelerate it. Stressful (panic zone rather than stretch zone) and dull learning shadows in comparison to what can be achieved using a relaxed and engaging approach.
7. The Image Brain Absorbs Information Instantly and Automatically. The human nervous system prefers image processing rather than work processing. Solid, tangible images are much easier to absorb and retain than verbal abstractions. Translating verbal abstractions into concrete images of all kinds makes learning faster and aids the recall process.