In this second part of our interview with Stella Collins, director and consultant at Stellar Learning and co-founder of Brain in Business, Stella and Ally discuss Stella’s influences, how pirates got her into training and ways to enliven ‘dry’ subject matter.
Click the green ‘play’ icon to listen now:
In Part One of our interview, Stella and Ally talk about what Brain Friendly Learning means for Stella, how to engage learners and the difference between fun and enjoyment!
Links mentioned in this podcast:
Finite Attention Span, blog by Dr Chris Atherton, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire
Brain Friendly Essentials e-books by Stella Collins and Anne Grindod
If you prefer to read our conversation, here’s the transcript:
Ally: Let me ask you about your influences. You’ve mentioned a couple of models and some authors, so in your journey, as Paul mentioned in the introduction, you have come from a computer background, and you are now passionate about training and development and brain friendly learning, so who have been your influences along that journey.
Stella: My Dad was probably the start because he was a teacher and he was a very passionate teacher who could get kids of all sorts to learn stuff and he didn’t care whether he was supposed to do it, he just got kids learning, he would do all sorts of great things to get kids motivated, he was highly motivational. I never wanted to be a teacher, far too scary, and though I was a computer geek for a while, my background was psychology.
I absolutely loved the whole psychology of learning, how people take in information and I guess when my children were born that was another inspiration, watching them learn naturally the things we can’t help but learn.
And for years I avoided the whole idea of training because I was on far too many IT training courses where you just sat in a darkened room tapping computers, so I definitely wasn’t going to do that. Then I met a group of people who were called P3, they have now gone off to do different things, I met them at a CIPD conference and amongst this conference of people in grey suits there was a ship of pirates, and I thought I want to work with those people and I did.
I went on a 3 day train the trainer effectively with them, and it was just like “this is it” , this is how you get information across to people, it doesn’t matter how boring people thought the information was, and I was in IT at the time, I thought I can go back and share IT with people using this methodology, using this process, using this creativity, so for me that’s how people learn.
Ally: It’s fascinating to me that you came into brain friendly learning from IT because many people associate the style and probably the fluff with soft skills training.
Stella: No, it’s much much better for serious stuff, the more serious the better in a sense, because they’re not expecting it, so it is easier to please them because if their not just sitting at their computers they think “wow that’s a change“, but actually that’s where you get the results. If you can teach somebody something, for example we were talking to a guy last week whose job it is to teach people in Afghanistan to diffuse IED’s, and they are really interested in this because of the results you get, because at the end of this learning process people have learned and it has stuck, and it’s there for life and for them it is really really important for them to know which cable to cut, so they have got to get it right.
So I think it is much more powerful for technical subjects, subjects that people think are dull and they are not dull, of course they are not dull, they are interesting subjects, but they have traditionally not been taught in an interesting way, they were taught in a lecturing style. I actually met the vice chancellor of a local university, who said they are really wanting to change the way university lecturers deliver information, he reckons there has got to be a better way to do it.
Ally: There is one of our subscribers of our blog in the public sector, in a university, she is a university lecturer and it is amazing reading her blog how she is looking to do things slightly differently, so we may put some links in at the end of the interview.
Stella: Yes, it’s like going back to how people must have learned before schools happened, and I’m all for schools, schools great, but people learned a long time before school happened, and before university. People learned stuff.
Ally: Isn’t that just about our definition of learning? Going out following your Dad around in the field or sitting on your mothers’ knee at home, we don’t think of that as learning because that will formalise learning and institutionalise learning.
Stella: We formalise learning into training, and for some organisations training is about how much information, content you can stuff into them. It doesn’t matter how hard you stuff, if they are not receptive, they don’t want to learn, they are never going to learn it are they?
Ally: I was working in Manchester with a trainer and he was talking about his transition from expert at the front to brain friendly learning and he used the phrase, “The way I used to do it, is like I cut off the top of their heads off and vomited knowledge into them” Pretty gross!!
Stella: And I bet a lot of it spilled out!
We are getting close to the end, so two things, I’m going to ask you if there is anything you would like to add AFTER I’ve asked you this question. If you had one piece of advice to give to someone just starting out in brain friendly learning what would that piece of advice be.
Stella: That’s a really good question. Mix with other people who are using the same principles and processes. One way of doing that is to join our brain friendly learning group, if you want to join the group read Paul and Allys’ blogs and information. Just try and absorb as much information as you can and be open to the idea of change. Just learn.
Ally: Learn naturally. Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners?
Stella: Well you very kindly said it would be ok to mention that we have just released our 3rd E book. We are actually following the process with 8 E books of our 6 step process with a bit of creativity and an overview book as well. So we have just released Motivate, how to motivate in just one minute, and that has actually been flying off the shelves which is fantastic.
Ally: We will put all the relevant links down below the recording. Stella thank you very much
Stella: Thank you it’s been lovely
Paul and Ally are working on an exciting 6-part (online) course to help your learners fully engage with your training - sign up for the 'early bird' list for advanced notification and more info
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