Top Tips to Make the Learner’s Notes Useful & More Effective

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How to Make Useful Effective and Notes When Learning

‘Make the Learner’s Notes Useful and Effective’ comes from the Free Guide – How to Get Employees to Use More of What They Have Learnt’.

Many trainers hand out their slides at the beginning of a training course. They then ask the Learners to make notes as they progress through the day. The problem with this is fourfold:

  • Learners don’t know how to make useful notes, so they note down every bit of information from the slides.
  • Someone other than the Learner has created the slides. This means that the graphs, images, and words are not displayed in the Learner’s preferred learning style, which makes the information much harder to understand after the training event.
  • By handing out slides, Learners take very few, or no notes. This means that the Learner has not had the chance to process the learning.
  • The slide deck becomes the Learner’s primary recollection of the day, which is not a useful method for implementing behavioural change, as there is too

This is a Mind Map created by the Inventor of Mind Maps:

Multi-coloured mind map with different coloured branches coming off the centre
A mind map allows learners to note down key information quickly

 

Tony Buzan, to show us how to successfully mind map.


Action: For Learners who have attended previous learning events and received slide decks, encourage them to convert their hand-outs into 1-page of notes or a 1-page mind map. Ask your Learners to identify how they learn best. Do they learn by physically making notes, flashcards, and mind maps (kinaesthetic learning)?

By reading and hearing their notes out loud (auditory learning)? Or simply by reading over their existing notes (visual learning)? By adopting methods that fit their most effective learning style, Learners will make their notes more useful and engaging, which will help to inspire behavioural change.

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