For HR and Training Professionals, Talent Managers and anyone with an interest in the pedagogic skills.
Pedagogy is also sometimes referred to as the correct use of teaching strategies. These should include the trainee’s background knowledge, experience, and environment, as well as the learning goals set by the trainee and trainer.
We also like the definition of a Guru as it might apply to Sales Training: The Dispeller of Darkness or The One Who Leads Us From Weakness to Strength, From Darkness to Light And From Death to Deathlessness (not sure about this last one).
Our own pedagogic principles are drawn from the Socratic method, the Kolb learning cycle, some of the useful and accessible parts of NLP, and Maslow’s Four Stages of Learning
1. Socratic method
A method of training in which the master imparts no information, but asks a sequence of questions, through answering which the trainee eventually comes to the desired knowledge. Also known as ‘guided discovery’. Socratic irony is the pose of ignorance on the part of the trainer, who will in fact know more about the matter than they let on. Based on the principle that if I am told something I may or may not accept it, but if I work out the answer myself, I am more likely to believe it.
2. Kolb learning cycle
3. NLP
We like these fundamentals of NLP and apply them in the training.
- Take responsibility for how others respond to you. (‘The meaning of your communication is the response you get’)
- Act as if people have all the mental and emotional resources they need even if they do not currently recognise this.
- Discover the other person’s perceptions before you begin to influence them. (‘Meet people in their own unique model of the world’)
- Recognise that in any situation a person is making the best choice with the resources which they currently perceive as being available to them.
- Recognise that each person’s ‘truth’ is true for them even if it differs from your ‘truth’ – since any person’s internal view of reality is just that – a ‘version’ of reality. (‘The map is not the territory’)
- Act as if every behaviour is/was a means of fulfilling a positive intention, at some level, in a person’s life. Redefine mistakes as feedback – and change what you are doing if what you are doing is not working
- Act as if there is a solution to every problem
4. Maslow’s Four Stages of Learning
Unconscious Incompetence
You don’t know how to do something, nor are you aware that you don’t know how to do it, nor are you even aware of what ‘it’ is.
Conscious Incompetence
You’re now aware of what you don’t know.
Conscious Competence
Now you know how to do it, but actually doing it takes conscious effort and concentration.
Unconscious Competence
You can do it without thinking, it’s ‘second nature’, you’re ‘a natural’.
Most skills acquisition follows this pattern. Think about learning to drive; learning a new language; learning to play golf, football, tennis; and where we’re concerned, learning to sell.
You’ll also notice that sometimes when you decide to learn a new skill and have professional coaching that the new way of ‘doing’ feels awkward and uncomfortable. And to start with your performance actually gets worse! What has happened is that you are in the Conscious Competence phase, and the only way to achieve the Unconscious Competence, the mastery of the skill, is to PRACTISE!
Soon your short term dip in performance will be overridden and you will reach a higher platform of aptitude which then becomes automatic. It’s exactly the same with Sales Training. You must persevere through the discomfort of trying out your new skills until you emerge from the awkwardness with a heightened level of now ingrained ability.
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