Rethinking the bad rap of rote

You know what gets a bad rap? Rote learning. Memorization. Repetition. In most classrooms, critical thinking smiles winningly and sets an apple on the teacher's desk while rote learning sulks in a corner facing the wall. The higher up the food chain, the less interested teachers seem to be in teaching by memorization. Even corporate trainers, who work in a realm where one would assume only outcomes matter, disdain this tried and true methodology. That's unfortunate, and here's why:

Automaticity. Researchers have found that automaticity, the ability to perform a task or recall a fact without thinking, is a key component of expertise. Benjamin Bloom went so far as to say that overtraining, practicing well beyond the level of competence, is the hallmark of excellence. He called automaticity "the hands and feet of genius." When you don't have to think about the basics anymore, your mind can concentrate on the finer points. The first time you drive on a highway you're just trying to stay alive. The ten-thousandth time you're only thinking about the fastest route home or the best way to get in front of the truck spewing blue smoke. That's expertise based on automaticity. And there's only one way to get automaticity, and that's through practice. Repetition. Doing something over and over until you can do it in your sleep. 

Expertise requires automaticity, and automaticity can be created through rote learning. So in essence, rote shortens the path to excellence. Why don't we take take the short-cut? It's not like this principle is lost to us. It's front and center in the most significant shift in our daily lives since the Internet: artificial intelligence. 

The way you teach a machine to think is by giving it hundreds of thousands of examples and then asking the software to do the same thing over and over while you assess the results and tweak the algorithms. In most cases, neural networks have to be trained on enormous amounts of data, doing millions of calculations over and over in order to learn. That's how we teach robots to think like humans. 

Above: "Teaching a robot to think," generated by a thinking robot that took instructions from a human

I know a lawyer who joined a new firm and was asked to give presentations to potential clients. He was required to memorize these presentations verbatim. As odd as it seemed at first, he became fluent in the main points of this new area of law almost overnight. From there he was able to dig deeper, to ask the right questions, to build on the foundation that was established by rote. That was speed to expertise. 

I led a training development project for a new venture in which front-line employees needed to interact with customers, and get up to speed very quickly. These employees were sourced and paid on the level of fast-food workers, but they weren't flipping burgers; they were dealing with people's nutritional health. We created five "mantras," short, simple, plain-language sentences that could be stated verbatim to customers. There was one for each of the five areas of expertise required: brand promise, nutrition, process, pricing, and product. Then each mantra had two "power phrases," which were slightly longer sentences that explained that mantra. It was one page of memorization that also served as the framework for all the other training to follow. We created short videos showing each mantra and each power phrase in action, to help with both memorization and delivery skills. We drilled and practiced. Voila. Speed to expertise via rote learning. 

It's funny how sometimes a big idea is an old idea with a new application. We have so many elearning tools that support, or could easily support, rote learning. Maybe we should think about why we teach machines the way we do, and draw some application from that. Maybe it's time for the old to become new again.  

The never-ending challenge of the video lecture

There is nothing worse in online education than a bad video lecture. This is a claim that needs no support, not if you've ever experienced the brain fog and wandering thoughts and heavy eyelids and overwhelming sense of deadening obligation uniquely generated by the monotonous drone of a back-lit talking head swimming in digital artifact while overexplaining an overpacked slide in a tinny, echoing voice. The ongoing challenge, of course, is that a poorly-executed video lecture is dead easy, while producing a quality online video presentation is not. But if you are a teacher, presenter, producer, instructional designer, or product developer in this space and these times, you really have no choice but to put in the work. Downshift into low gear, let out the clutch, put the pedal down and power yourself out of the boring muck.   

Here are my top five key elements for video lectures, from hard-won experience. 

1. Audio first. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the quality of your audio is actually more important than the quality of your video. Think of it this way, if all else goes south at least a learner can pop in their earbuds and take a long, invigorating walk. But if the audio is hard to take for long stretches, you're sunk before you leave the harbor. Good audio is always the backbone of good video.

2. Bits and bites. Don't ask anyone to watch a 20, 30, or 60-minute video. The only thing people ever watch in their real lives for even thirty minutes straight are things produced with multi-milion dollar budgets. You aren't in a classroom, no matter where your video was recorded. You're on someone's laptop, or phone, or tablet, or television. You're in their space, competing with the next installment of Mission Impossible. Don't compete. Cut your presentation up into small, proccessable chunks that match the content. Make it hard on yourself so it's easy on them.

3. Eye contact. A presenter on video actually has an enormous advantage over a presenter in a classroom in this one, important regard: you can look every person in the eye all the time. Or at least, that's how participants percieve it whenever you are looking at the camera. This is powerful. Take advantage of it, even if it means practicing until you are finally comfortable gazing cheerfully into that black hole of a camera lens.  

4. The right light. Pay attention to what you look like, just as you would if you were getting a portrait taken by a professional photographer. It doesn't need to look formal; it just needs to look good. Three-point lighting is what people expect, even though they may not know it. It's the professional standard we see all the time, the unconscious bar that, when you fall short of it, tells people this is an amateur production: Key light, fill light, back light. In many cases, bad lighting is simply back and fill light without any key light. Add that, and you're golden. Here's what Wikipedia knows.

5. Good graphics. Nothing says "I don't care" quite so eloquently as a long series of text-only slides read aloud. Make sure your slides are visually appealing, and don't overpack them. Don't read them verbatim. Use bullet points that require further explanation. Annotate as you teach, underline, circle, draw stars and exclamation points. Not everything is equally important; accentuate the big ideas. Add graphs, add images. The students pictured above were generated with Microsoft's Copilot. Fun and easy.

The list goes on, but these are at the top. And always remember, the lecture portion will never be the most engaging part of your course no matter what you do. The greatest payoff will come from time, energy, creativity, and resources that you invest in developing activities and assignments that truly spark the imagination.