This is a summary of the book “How People Learn – designing education and training that works to improve performance” by Nick Shackleton-Jones and published by Kogan Page in 2023. He is the HR Director for Talent and Learning at Deloitte, UK.

He says education is imposed on the learners often neglecting their cares and concerns. He states the problems with the schools, colleges and organizations and then offers a sensible solution. He calls for a “Affective Context Model”- a first unified learning theory which prioritizes emotions as the root of learning. He brings forward new ideas in his book and debunks many of the established ones.

He recognizes that the status quo reinforces cognition and learning which has evolved from history. There has always been a need to convert people to productive workers but the drift between what’s taught and what’s needed has widened in several contexts. Instead, the pattern of things we care about  and the world we find ourselves in are the two things that interact, shaping each other throughout our lives. If we align this learning, we find ourselves in a dream job otherwise we take up on where we are doing things that do not matter to us.

Storytelling and language have been the primary way to convey experiences and emotions to others. This learning-based system continually assesses an individual's need and liberty to explore challenges of escalating difficulty. The Affective Context Model states that we store our affective reactions to experiences and use these to reconstruct them. Learning will not always equal knowledge transfer. This stems  from the recognition that learning is a change in behavior or capability as a result of memory and memory is defined as the encoding of an affective response to an experience, which allows that experience to be reconstructed.

The deeper the personal significance, the more reliable something is learned, and we don’t often repeat our embarrassing mistakes. The brain stores what matters most. It recalls emotional moments based on our reactions. It might also encode other people’s reactions.  A loud meeting remains in our memory because of the outburst rather the point of the meeting. The author makes a point of this idea by sticking a banana under the chair of some of the attendees to his conference so that when he meets them years later, they can recall just that. He goes on to assert that there is no distinction between semantic and episodic memory.

People can share the same experiences and remember different things. This means they take-away differently. While words can express emotions and reactions just as much as objects or concepts, communication can lead to activation of similar feelings in the listener. Predicting these reactions requires a deep understanding of what is significant to the individual, highlighting the role of empathy and personalization in education. This might suggest better storytelling.

Forcing content into people’s heads is practiced widely in oriental cultures. Enlivening the lessons with enthusiasm has shown spotty results. Cramming and spewing it out during examinations and forgetting afterwards has become an academic rigor. Taking notes helps with cramming but it only helps with learning when there is an emotional connection to the material. Similarly, a group of employees making a transition to roles as first-time managers might create a seminar around the top 10 things to do and not to do as a new leader which addresses their aspirations and fears.

Personal growth is influenced by both innate characteristics and environmental influences. Discrepancies in personal values can lead to conflicts unless acknowledged and resolved. Designing learning experiences has a connection with life experiences, both involve presenting meaningful challenges and linking new concerns to pre-existing ones. A human centered approach along with a willingness to experiment and refine iteratively immensely helps. There are two types of learning intervention – pull by building resources and not courses and push by designing experiences to build capacity. Simulations boost learning impact further. When people already care about a topic, they might offer resources they can “pull” from. The best pull resources are concise

Finally, the author proposes a 5Di learning design model that provides memorable effective education. 5Di starts by defining success, discovering what matters to the learners, designing the experiences, developing the resources and tools, involving the learners and deploying the solutions in an iterative manner. The solution is either to allow the people to learn as they care, or to find a way to make them care.