Anyone Can Learn Anything: Adaptive Learning

preductiv
preductiv
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

She only has 5 minutes to present 20 slides worth of content to an eager crowd at Ignite. Adjusting her microphone behind the stage, awaiting for her name to be called to speak to an audience filled with government, organizational, and technology leaders. She walks out onto the stage and begins to share the passion and story behind Preductiv:

Giselle Mota of @Preductiv speaks at Ignite Talks on adaptive learning and how “anyone can learn anything”

“SO, everybody help me out. By a show of hands, tell me if you think you were a pretty smart kid growing up, yeah? Alright, some of ya’ll…great! Well, not me…not at all, actually. You see, I struggled with so many concepts while my siblings were striving and doing wonderful things, they hardly had to apply themselves. I struggled. I had a big issue in school growing up and I remember I had one instructor, one teacher in elementary school, she thought she saw something bright in me of potential. And she told me to take a test to see if I would pass the grade. So, I took the test and failed miserably and she said I was a disappointment and an embarrassment. See, I struggled with dyslexic tendencies growing up and everything was very difficult for me to grasp on to but if you fast forward I actually evolved into a gifted student. I went in to the International Baccalaureate Schools, got a Master’s Degree, became a professor of business, a training consultant… But, how did that happen? How did that happen? One, the grace of God, better teachers along the way, a wonderful mother, and…McGyver.”

Giselle mentions several concepts and examples of adapting learning content and training to learners to achieve truly productive results. She shared her own story of seeing this concept work in her own life and how organizations at corporate and academic settings can see these same results in their learners.

“McGyver was ‘that dude’! He was creative, innovative, and he was able to adapt any situation to be able to succeed. And I learned how to become an adaptive learner, to take my limited resources and really become a person who was succeeding in that. Many organizations get frustrated with their talent because they feel like they train them but the people aren’t really being productive. And that’s at any academic all the way to corporate settings however, are those organizations really adapting the materials for their learners? That’s what I would ask.

Passage USA is a program that is now enabling adults with disabilities to go to college for the first time because they are adapting the learning to those students, even students with Down’s syndrome. Mr. Mooney is a high school instructor who brought in Kendrick Lamar and brought in all these musicians and things like that to be able to teach History and English to their students. Such as Ms. Valencia as well, Ms. Valencia Clay is doing that, she just published her students for the first time. Professor Michelle Clifton is a professor of Liberal Arts in Chicago and she is teaching inmates Liberal Arts education that did not even have a GED to begin with. Again, adapting content to meet the learner’s needs.

I teach a program called Emerging Leaders, it’s based out of Boston and I teach here in Tampa to CEOs. They are a curriculum that normally they would teach at a Master’s Degree level and we adapt the content and train it to CEOs who don’t have that level of education and they become strategic and wonderful. See, learning doesn’t have to be stale. It shouldn’t be standardized. It shouldn’t be one thing that everybody clicks in a boring training and gets through. It should be adaptive to the learner. And that’s something that I like to teach corporations that I go into and academic settings as well. That you can actually make learning fun, engaging, collaborative, and it should create the productive results that your corporation is wanting after all.

I actually taught a college course, it was an economics course…super boring. But I got my adult learners to be able create a simulation of an ice cream shop. They competed and they started learning and thriving in concepts of scarcity, supply and demand, and many formulas. I also taught a course in Microsoft Office. Again… Access, databases, Excel, you name it all the crazy concepts for some people. But again adapting the learning, being able to create a startup simulation where they were able to present a business proposal at the end.

And corporations, no matter what the training is and no matter how standardized it has to be or how unique it has to be to the organization you can actually create adaptive learning at any level to create the results that you want to see in business. We assume that everybody learns the same way. That if we give everyone the same training material, the same boring curriculum, the same things that everyone should come up with productive results but that’s not the case. We really have to start understanding how the brain works and how people learn to set people up for success.

I like learning analytics — data analytics to be able to understand where somebody is currently, where is their area of struggle, where are they proficient and then start to kind of connect those dots and create a productive learning plan. We have students all over the world with STEM programs. They are learning coding, analytics, all types of complicated subjects because we are starting to adapt curriculum and be able to enable learners.

So, imagine the possibilities of what can happen at any level (all the way from young students to adult learners all around the world) when we bridge the gap between learning efforts and productivity with learning analytics. And that’s what I think is definitely possible. Thank you so much for listening to me today.”

Invite Giselle to speak at your next event or share strategies to empower your organization to have effective learners. At Preductiv, Giselle often presents sessions with other great thought leaders that are her consulting partners; such as Ron Klein, inventor of the MLS system, magnetic credit card strip, and other innovations who co-presents workshops and talks with Giselle.

Giselle Mota and Ron Klein

For more information, please visit www.bepreductiv.com

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preductiv

Improving learning outcomes while increasing organizational productivity. Founder | Speaker | Learning Strategist @Preductiv: Giselle Mota

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