Engage the Right to Land on the Left
“Emotion is the fast lane to the brain.” These are the words of Doug Stevenson, author of the Story Theater Method, and speaker at today’s CIASTD meeting. I have to tell you Doug made me laugh, he made me sad, at times I was touched – the key is I was feeling and learning at the same time.
The Story Theory Method is about using your personal stories to enthrall and engage learners to make a point. It’s about engaging the right side of the brain, tapping into the audience’s emotions, involving them in your story. Ultimately you land with your learning point on the left side of the brain for long term learning transfer.
Doug encourages us to use this method for all types of training to capture our learners’ attention, even for very left brained topics such as accounting and even if the story seems completely unrelated to the topic. Think about some of your stories, maybe a time you made a mistake at work. In the moment, you probably felt a range of emotions: stress, fear, relief at the resolution. What did you learn from the experience? How can you tie what you learned to the topics you’re training? Share your story with the audience and see if you connect with their right brain and land on the left.
What do you think - is emotion a key to learning transfer?
Tags: Doug Stevenson, learning transfer, left brain, right brain, Story Theater Method
April 24th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Kia ora!
I like the idea of the story and use it a lot, and not just for lessons. When writing a fetching blog post the story carries a similar way of capturing the reader to get a point across more effectively.
I wonder about emotion though. While it may be a ‘fast lane to the brain’ it may not be the lane that leads to the appropriate part of the mind. For a start, emotional experiences precipitated by an event are not always the same in every participant. What can cause an angry reaction in one participant can bring on patriotic pleasure in another for instance.
Music is one tried and tested medium that’s known to create an emotive effect, yet its connotative reaction in each particpant is certainly not the same in every case and it can vary widely in its target and effect. It is for this and other similar reasons that I wonder about using emotion specifically to engage learners; its use may not bring about learning of the desired form in any of the would-be-learners. It can lead the learner down undesired or inappropriate pathways.
Further to this, I’d stick my neck out and say that emotion isn’t the key to learning transfer, if there is such a solution. Interest and fostering curiosity in something relevant to the learner are far more likely to transfer learning appropriately. Interest - relevance - engagement: none of those are necessarily enhanced by invoking a significant emotional factor during the learning process. But if interest or curiosity are considered emotions, and I’d doubt that, then they would be the most appropriate to use.
Catchya later
from Middle-earth