Preface
Brilliance by Design will show you how to bring passion, relationship, purpose, and success to every learning opportunity. It captures the best of what I’ve learned from mentors, friends, students, and colleagues through my 35 years of helping people learn and creating high-impact instructional design. It combines that knowledge with 20+ years of brain and learning behavioral research to arm you with hundreds of new strategies and practices to add to your repertoire. Brilliance by Design will help you align your best intentions with your methods and objectives and mobilize passionate learners to get amazing results.
Extreme Engagement
The secret to powerful instruction is engagement—involving learners in activities in which they do the work of interacting with new content, wrestling with concepts, and teaching those concepts to others. Learner-centered classrooms, training rooms, and meeting rooms—wherever learning is happening—are noisy and alive with energetic activity as learners think out loud, build knowledge, conceive their own models for understanding, and practice applying those models. The learners talk more while the teacher talks and presents less. As people hear their own voices and engage in challenges designed to help them understand at deeper levels, they learn by teaching. They access more of their potential and contribute at higher levels, resulting in retention and application over time. In this dynamic world, the teacher’s job is to engage learners in myriad ways: to connect them to ideas and skills, challenge them and support their accruing knowledge, celebrate their brilliance, and help them apply their learning to real-world situations. In teaching, you consciously connect in order to engage, and you engage in order to create new meaning, beliefs, and behaviors.
It is rigorous work that energizes both learners and teachers and builds continuously on deep connections.
Brilliance Is a Trajectory
When my son Nicholas came home from his first year at college, he was clearly excited about everything he had experienced—but all he could talk about was how he had nailed a particular question on one of his finals. I heard him share with his dad how he masterfully pulled a discrete fact from his brain and figured out the trick in the question. He also shared his insight with me, the neighbors, two friends, and with his grandmother on the phone. If you were to call him, I am sure he would share it with you, too.
Every parent wants his or her child to feel brilliant. As I listened to Nick, however, I was struck by how rare it is to hear that kind of joy in one’s outpouring of creativity and genius. We hear people talk about sports, movies, the weather, or what they had for dinner, but seldom about the times when they felt brilliant. What series of events leads to learning moments where everything clicks and comes together—the right information, powers of observation, and the ability to think and articulate those thoughts?
I realized that brilliance is a trajectory. It is a relationship filled with requests, clear expectations, mindful practice, and learning over time. Nick’s ability to answer the test question came from a carefully orchestrated combination of clear information, hard work, and learning from lectures, DVDs, practical labs, and peer study groups. The integration of each of these activities allowed him to confidently weave a quarter’s worth of acquired knowledge from a variety of sources into brilliance. It was brilliance, designed.
Replace “Sit ‘n’ Get” with “Woo ‘n’ Do”
What distinguishes Brilliance by Design from most books on learning is that it contains a specific instructional design model that revolutionizes typical teaching methods. It upturns the passive “sit ‘n’ get” format ingrained in our culture and replaces it with a proven model for optimal learning that “woos” people as they “do” the work. I share in these pages my secrets, tips, tools, and strategies as well as stories of my successes and failures and what I learned from them. I invite you to take this information and use it to unleash the brilliance in others, achieve powerful outcomes, and build communities of learners—confident learners who will share best practices and communicate at a deep and profound level as they take your content out into the world and do the real work to transform it.
Brilliance by Design articulates a three-part system—the Brilliance Learning System:
• Part 1 focuses on strategies to develop your content, or what you are going to teach;
• Part 2 helps you gain a deeper understanding of the people in the learning equation (learners and teachers), or who you want to learn; and
• Part 3 gives you hundreds of ideas to implement each aspect of the six-step ENGAGE Learning Design Model that, when followed, is how you are going to unleash brilliance.
To help inspire and facilitate your ability to move key concepts to action, please interact with the content of the book and complete the activities, questions, and challenges. This will help you gain a deeper awareness of your thoughts, generate greater meaning, and move the learning to high-impact application.
Brilliance Is Not a Random Act
Brilliance is not a random act. It is the result of learning over time—having the space to dig deep into preexisting learning and combine it with new knowledge, resulting in unique thoughts. It is about people, content, and a structure for learning designed to connect, inspire, and engage.
Learning is a deep, compelling human connection. It is the gateway to optimal life experiences. Learning transforms people’s lives. And teaching, in any forum, is the art and science of bringing out the brilliance that drives those transformations.
People are naturally brilliant in their own unique ways. Our brilliance—our intelligence, talent, skills, and creativity—resides close to the surface, waiting to emerge through inspiration and rigorous work. This process of connecting with our innate brilliance to further our learning also connects us to the best in ourselves and the best in others. It empowers us and makes us feel alive. It is the extraordinary privilege of a teacher—and by teacher I want to be clear that this means anyone who seeks to bring out the best in others—to facilitate the full potential, the brilliance, of every learner in every learning situation.
Teaching, in any forum, is the art and science of bringing out the brilliance that drives transformations.
The Tragedy of Too Few Brilliant Moments
The last time I trained at a Fortune 100 company, during our break I walked past the doorway of a nearby training room and glanced in at the participants. They reminded me of characters in the old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers: glazed faces, blank stares—people sitting motionless and looking at a PowerPoint slide show while a well-meaning instructor talked a blue streak.
In the workplace today and in classrooms around the world, there are too many opportunities to leave our brains at the door and too few opportunities for brilliance. People are asked to come to meetings or training with no advance notice about what is going to be discussed and no opportunity to prepare. Then they are expected to provide meaningful input into key decisions and outcomes that will impact the organization long into the future. We give them huge notebooks of information and, after quickly reviewing it with them, expect them to remember it all and instantly put the concepts into action. And we are consistently disappointed when they do not immediately close new business or use the information accurately. In short, we often set people up to fail, and then we are irritated when they do.
Unlock Brilliance in Any Situation
So how can you create more opportunities for people to unleash their brilliance? Brilliance by Design shows you a proven, powerful educational design for creating optimal learning experiences every time you teach by using a learner-centered and active—not passive—approach. It revolutionizes typical teaching methodologies to get your learners sitting on the edge of their seats and eagerly anticipating learning.
In the early years of my career as a teacher, counselor, and school administrator, I worked with kids from every walk of life—from children of famous scientists to the toughest, most challenging gang members. From juvenile detention centers to jails, from gifted and special education classrooms to after-school detention and study groups, I helped kids find success when others had given up. In my current role as Vice President of Applied Learning at The Ken Blanchard Companies, I write, teach, and deliver powerful learning systems for corporate clients like Nike, Wells Fargo-Wachovia, Gap, Microsoft, and GlaxoSmithKline while teaching executive leadership courses at two universities. Like you, my role changes day to day, minute to minute. No matter what role you or I play in life, when it comes right down to it, to be highly successful, each of us needs to be a learner and a teacher. The circular energy that arises from the mutuality of teaching and learning is a powerful, fulfilling connection.
Each Person Has a Unique Contribution
From the classroom to the boardroom, learning starts with the fundamental fact that each person exists to make a unique contribution to the world. Every teacher needs to find a way to reach joyfully into the soul of learners and facilitate their brilliance so that they can make their contributions. It is my hope that Brilliance by Design will help you pursue and achieve that transformational goal.
The Brilliance Learning System Applies to Any Learning Situation
The Brilliance Learning System is fractal in nature. You can use it to teach in any learning situation, including but not limited to classrooms, meetings, workshops, and keynote speeches. You can use it to coach one person at a time, to facilitate a virtual sales meeting with your global team, to train a roomful of people at all levels in an organization, or to give a keynote address to thousands. The core principles apply equally well regardless of the amount of time: forty-minute meetings, hour-long keynotes, or four-day training sessions. This system helps anyone who brings people together for the purpose of learning, problem solving, or innovating to develop a clear, high-impact training design; analyze learner and teacher needs; create objectives that meet those needs; incorporate interactive tools that “fire ’em up”; ensure compliance with all key outcomes; and send people out into the world feeling empowered to change their lives.
Preview of What’s Ahead: The Book at a Glance
The introduction, “The Time for Brilliance Has Come” relates stories of inspirational teachers who have had a profound impact, takes a close look at how and why these teachers were so remarkable, and describes the three parts of the Brilliance Learning System: People, Content, and Learning Design.
Chapter 1, “Fire Up the Synergy between Learners and Teachers,” explains the power of a highly collaborative relationship and explores in detail the first component of the Brilliance Learning System: People. You will learn about the revolutionary premise Whoever is doing the teaching is doing the learning as well as the three pivotal 70/30 Principles that rebalance the learning equation and reframe the mindset of the teacher. You also will learn how to leverage compelling human connections to inspire intellectual passion while catalyzing your own strengths and the strengths of your learners.
In Chapter 2, you will learn to “Craft Content That Sings” and commit to the second component of the Brilliance Learning System: Content. The clarity of your content, crafted into a meaningful model, can be a power tool for interactive, retainable learning. Presenting it in digestible pieces and through concrete examples sets learners up for success and makes recall attainable. You’ll read true stories that illustrate how important it is to tap into and sometimes shift learners’ beliefs in order for them to be open to new learning.
The third component of the Brilliance Learning System, Learning Design, is detailed in Chapters 3 through 9. Chapter 3 is a quick overview of the ENGAGE Model. It will help you see the total flow and structure to enable you to bring out the brilliance in others. The subsequent chapters walk you through the model step by step for a deeper look and a chance to move your learning to action through templates and activities.
Chapters 4 through 9 also expand on each of the six steps of the ENGAGE Model. These chapters give you hundreds of ideas, strategies, and practices for how to energize and value learners, make knowledge accessible and meaningful, assess and celebrate learning, and apply and extend the learning in their lives. I will share with you a treasure trove of learning activities for all types of learners, the basis for multiple approaches, and tips and insights, tested over time, that I have developed myself or learned and borrowed from my many brilliant teachers.
Chapter 10, “Bringing Out Brilliance in the Virtual Classroom,” shows you how to take advantage of digital technology so that you will be able to more specifically connect, inspire, and engage the online learner. It overflows with creative tools and strategies for maximizing learning in the virtual classroom and it focuses on the power of connecting learners to their core purpose.
Tap all Opportunities.
A Great Teacher Is Like a Great Athlete
While it may not be intuitive to be a great teacher, it is something you can learn. If you use the Brilliance Learning System and the ENGAGE Model, you will develop your abilities and ensure your successes. You will learn to impart information in a way that consistently improves your skill and helps you align your intentions with your efforts. You will send your learners out the door armed with tools and strategies for applying their new knowledge in their lives when they need it. Being a great teacher is like being a great athlete: It is a constant challenge, but if you are willing to learn and grow, you can keep getting better. Hard work and practice make all the difference in the kind of learning that transforms lives.