12: Learning Controversies with Leslie Early

Leslie Early  0:00  
We're learning so much about how the brain organizes information. So the fact that you're using your own handwriting like you have a whole huge developed section of your brain dedicated to your own handwriting.

Heidi Kirby  0:19  
Hello friends,

and welcome to the BLOC, the Building Learning and Organizational Culture Podcast. I'm your host Heidi Kirby. On today's episode, I talk to Leslie Early. With over 10 years of elementary education teaching experience, she's just successfully made the transition to a corporate instructional designer. She also hosts the wonderful, That's Awesome ID Podcast. Today we talk about some of the things that we as teachers bring with us to L&D, including ideas about learning objectives, pedagogy, and learning styles and what research and people in the field of l&d have to say about these, sometimes controversial, topics. So please enjoy this episode after a brief word from our sponsor, Verasana.

Verasana Narrator  1:11  
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Heidi Kirby  1:40  
Hey, Leslie, how are you doing today?

Leslie Early  1:42  
 I'm good, how are you? Bright and early over here?

Heidi Kirby  1:46  
It is not bright here, but it's still relatively early. So let me start with my first question that I always ask my guests and that's just tell me a little bit about yourself how you got into instructional design and then any fun facts you want to share to 

Leslie Early  2:02  
Oh boy, well, I was a teacher and mostly teaching elementary students for about 10 years and then decided you know, 10 years was a good run. So it started looking for something else. But I really loved curriculum development and the creative side and helping people achieve, you know, their learning goals. So I kind of transitioned that into instructional design because it keeps all the things that I liked about teaching without the in classroom chaos that you have to sometimes go through as a teacher, so yeah, so I've been kind of transitioning. I just landed my first full time corporate ID job so I was excited about that.

Heidi Kirby  2:43  
Yay!

Leslie Early  2:43  
Yeah - let me think a fun fact. Well, I - this is my - no one can see the camera really, but I'm wearing a shirt that has sloths on it. Yeah, I have quite a sloth - quite a collection of sloth things, including socks, shirts, stuffed animals, obviously, a heating pad... many things (laughs)

Heidi Kirby  3:03  
Oh, so you're into sloths. (laughs) Okay. And I will say because I can see you and the listeners can't that this is not just like a sloth shirt - it's like a button up.

Leslie Early  3:14  
It's a dress shirt - Yeah, it's a fancy sloth.

Heidi Kirby  3:17  
It is! It's fancy. I love it.

Leslie Early  3:20  
And I feel like this is - my fashion still is hanging over from my elementary school teacher days.

Heidi Kirby  3:28  
Well, my fashion has gone from like workwear to like hoodies, and what I like to call nice sweatshirts. Because I'm working from home. So you know, yes, it's all relative...

Leslie Early  3:41  
Athleisure.

Heidi Kirby  3:41  
Yeah, that's what they call it without the "ath" part, mostly

Leslie Early  3:46  
- just leisure.

Heidi Kirby  3:49  
So I do want to say for our listeners who don't know you that when I think of someone who has transitioned from teaching to instructional design, you're a great example. I just have to say that. When I first saw you on LinkedIn and connected with you you had posted, it was like an outerspace Photoshop project. And I was like, This is so cool. I need to connect with her like she's somebody in the field I need to connect with. And so I connected with you. And then when I was talking to our mutual friend about, you know, kind of how hard it is to find guests who really want to talk about and are passionate about instructional design. She sent me the presentation for the Central Ohio ATD Emerging Professionals Showcase. And you were presenting there too. I was like, wait, I just connected with her on LinkedIn. And then last week, I heard you on Erica Zimmer's The Learning Journal podcast. So I just want to say like as far as making a successful transition, Leslie is someone to emulate and learn from because she was out there before she even had a job - like people were noticing her and her professional brand on LinkedIn before she even nabbed that job. So good job.

Leslie Early  5:05  
Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, I mean, like I said, going to the Photoshop thing is like, I just love being creative. And I love learning new things. Like that's just like - I will spend too much money like taking courses and like doing things, like buying books, and like things that maybe I'll never even look at. But I just want to have it, because I might want to learn that someday. 

Heidi Kirby  5:28  
Sure. 

Leslie Early  5:29  
So I'm like, obsessive in that way. So and then I also know, I mean, I'm not a young person really anymore, I would say I'm getting towards middle age. So I have quite a bit of experience with like, fandom and like, these other things that are not necessarily professional, but they're online communities. So I think that's where my impulse to be like, a content creator or engaged people came from, like, I'm taking, like, things that I learned in my 20s in Facebook, or like Tumblr, I mean, Tumblr is kind of, I don't know, hot topic to bring up I guess, because like, some weird people are on Tumblr, but you know, there's a lot of just like, fandoms on Tumblr, too. Yeah, innocent fandom. So that's kind of my Tumblr. And so I guess when I got in LinkedIn, I just started doing the same behaviors. And I was like, Well, I'm just gonna share what I'm creating and be passionate and find other people who are passionate about the same things. And and, you know, I guess I just have some practice with that. So it was natural for me. Yeah. Get on there. And, and start moving and shaking, I guess. 

Heidi Kirby  6:33  
Just share it. 

Leslie Early  6:34  
Yeah, yeah. 

Heidi Kirby  6:35  
So I feel like we could talk about your transition from teaching to instructional design all day. But you just talked to Erica Zimmer, about that on her podcast. And we talk about that a lot here on the show. So I kind of want to move a little bit past that, right? And I think that there are some things that as former educators, I won't necessarily call them all learning myths that we're going to talk about today. But there are some things that we learn as educators that we bring with us to instructional design that we either have to kind of tweak, or have an unpopular opinion on sometimes, or just pitch, right? And the first one I want to talk about was what you presented on at the Central Ohio ATD Emerging Professionals Showcase. And that's this whole idea of andragogy and pedagogy, because just last week, I saw a post that was mad about job descriptions mentioning pedagogy because that's not what we do in instructional design. So tell me, just briefly about your presentation. And kind of your thoughts on this whole andragogy versus pedagogy argument.

Leslie Early  7:51  
If you look up the term andragogy, which is I guess, at this point, synonymous with adult learning theory, really the only group of people who use this term, it's almost exclusively used in organizational training circles. So outside of L&D, nobody knows what this means, or you know, how it's how it's supposed to be different from pedagogy. So I mean, I would say it is a legitimate thing. It's a legitimate theory. I mean, Malcolm Knowles, came up with this back in late 70s, early 80s. And trying to describe for the purposes of training, how to approach adult learners, which I get, that's legit. But now it's become obsessive. I think of like that this is totally different from pedagogy. And in my studies that came across as andragogy being teaching of man, or they're looking at the Greek root of the word, right, that andragogy means teaching a man. And pedagogy means teaching a child, which is great, that's fine to look at, like the etymology of where this came from. But almost nobody uses pedagogy in that way. These days. nobody's talking about children exclusively, when they use the term pedagogy, especially because this term is used all the time in higher education. 

Heidi Kirby  9:14  
Wow. Yes. Absolutely.

Leslie Early  9:17  
And so I mean, and the principles of andragogy are like, you know, adults need to be involved in the planning of their instruction, their learning needs to be based on experiences, they need to be interested in the subject matter. And also they the learning should be problem centered. So all of these four things, though, you could easily say that should be happening in a classroom, no matter what the age of the student. So really, andragogy is just like, problem based, or I would call this project based learning if I was taught about it in the classroom. Sure. Oh, I don't want to say they're completely different because I think there's a lot that overlaps And I just don't understand 100% why people in L&D are so anti-pedagogy? Or maybe there's just a misunderstanding of what pedagogy means in the full scope of like education?

Heidi Kirby  10:15  
No, I completely agree with that. I think that of all the red flags in a job description, that should not be one of them. That one's -  that one's okay. Like, that's okay. If you see that in a job description, right?

Leslie Early  10:29  
Yeah. Because again, I think especially if the job description is for something in higher ed, like, it would make perfect sense for them to be talking about pedagogy, even if the position they're looking for is an instructional designer. If you're in that world, they're still using the term pedagogy just to mean, whatever method of teaching, it doesn't matter who you're teaching. Just this is a method of teaching. So -

Heidi Kirby  10:53  
Yeah, absolutely. So the next one is now - this is definitely not a learning myth. But this is something that we both talked very briefly before this about how it's such a hot topic right now. And that is the idea of learning objectives. And should they be placed at the beginning of every learning experience, whether that's in-person, e-course, what have you, what are your thoughts?

Leslie Early  11:25  
I mean, I don't know if I've been in a corporate ID setting and have enough experience with this to really know or say with any certainty. But I mean, my intuition is telling me that probably context is the most important thing. If we're like, for instance, I'm working on a project right now, that's basically for civil engineers, you know, to be able to do their job safely, they need to learn certain mathematical formulas and how to apply them. And that's very knowledge-based, right? Like, we're not trying to get a behavior out of the civil engineers, we're just saying, This is the information you need to know to do your job safely, or well, and there's learning objectives. And in that case, it makes sense to have the learning objectives because it's almost it's very similar to like an academic course, which I think learning objectives makes sense in. But if it's like, I can see where people get in a kerfuffle about it is like, if you're trying to teach something like soft skills, or you're trying to change a behavior, putting those learning objectives right up front at the beginning, maybe takes out some of the experience based journey of what that would be, so yeah, I don't know, what do you think? I mean, to me, I think it just depends on the context of what you're trying to achieve. 

Heidi Kirby  12:46  
No, I completely agree, I think that you kind of hit on something, that the safety training is a little bit more - to kind of go with schools of thought - it's a little bit more behaviorist. Right? And so it's important to have kind of those, you know, maybe Bloom's Taxonomy behavioral-based objectives, right? To be able to define something or describe something, but like you said, if you're taking an annual compliance, sexual harassment training, to say, oh, by the end of this course, you should be able to define sexual harassment, right? Like that's, it just seems it seems odd, it seems oddly placed. What I like to do in those cases, is use some learning objectives from the affective domain, that are kind of structured in a way that is designed to change an opinion or a feeling or a moral and they have kind of those more abstract kind of ideas. So like, instead of starting with, like describe or define, they start with like, respect, right? And so they're a little bit different. But as far as, as far as perspective, what I've noticed is that the learners, by and large, don't care if the objectives are there or not. That's not true of all learners, because you get some really good ones, or you get some really, you get the kind of people in like your classes that want to know why they have to take this training, right. And so that does a really good job of answering that question from the very beginning, because then the expectation is set. But by and large, you've got people especially with like compliance or onboarding training, they know that no matter what they have to do it anyway. So the objectives are just like an extra thing to get past. Right? So I think that if you're doing a good job of creating successful, engaging, content, that it can be helpful. But  from the learners perspective, it doesn't always matter. I think that from the designers perspective, it's hugely important to have them somewhere, right? So even if you're not putting them at the beginning of your course. You need to know when you start designing this whatever, what the objectives are. Right? 

Leslie Early  15:06  
Right. Yeah. And I think that's what I think that's what I've seen people talk about is that learning objectives are for the instructional designer and not for the learner. And if you put them in front of the learner, you're basically putting your learner to sleep. But then the other thing I wanted to say is, is kind of like, we've all been trained if we all went through the American education system, and how to present your ideas to somebody and in your basic essay format, is like, you're going to tell somebody what you're going to tell them. And then you tell them, and then you tell them what you just told them? Like, that's the introduction, body and conclusion, right? I think it makes sense that this is almost an affordance. Or this is almost just an expected structure of how we should how information is presented to us. We're expecting some form of introduction, some form of, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you. And if we don't get that, even though maybe to some people, it seems unnecessary. It might cause anxiety. You know, like, if you if you don't tell your learner, what what you're going to tell them? Even if they can kind of assume it, it still might be a little bit uncomfortable. But I'm just thinking out loud here. I don't know for sure. 

Heidi Kirby  16:25  
No, I don't really have a good answer, either. Because I've worked at places where it was like, you better put the learning objectives on the first slide, or will fire you, you know, like that, that very serious treatment of it. But then I've also worked at places where it's like, ehh... do what you want. 

Leslie Early  16:41  
Yeah. 

Heidi Kirby  16:42  
You're the designer, you know? And so I think to another way to kind of consider it is that they don't have to be a bullet pointed list, right? And maybe that's where people struggle is that they think of them as like this long list of like, bullet points of do this, do this. And yeah, that might be boring. But if you have a video-based course, then somebody comes on video in the beginning and says, here's what you're going to learn. Maybe more boring than the actual content, but less boring than that bullet list, right?

Leslie Early  17:17  
Yeah, I talked to Chris Syracuse about cognitive load theory on my last episode. And we were talking about this idea of having a schema of where to put your information when you're learning it. So I think maybe that's also part of it. It's the "I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you" is basically building the box of so these are the boundaries of what you're gonna learn. So that when you're learning it, you're not you have a place to put it, even if it's a temporary place in your working memory. There's a place for sure, though. Yeah, I don't know. So now, the more I'm talking about it, I'm thinking yeah, they probably are a good idea, except for maybe certain situations where you can skip them. 

Heidi Kirby  17:57  
But yeah, we'd love to hear everyone else's ideas when I post this podcast for sure. Like, let's let's chat about it. Let's - comment on it. Tell us what you think - "you guys are horribly wrong." (laughs)

Leslie Early  18:11  
"No idea what you're talking about" (laughs)

Heidi Kirby  18:13  
We, we welcome all opinions. Right?

Leslie Early  18:16  
Right. 

Heidi Kirby  18:17  
However, maybe we don't welcome all opinions on this last one. No, I'm just kidding. Kidding, not kidding. Save the best for last and that is learning styles. Every child has a style in which they learn. And you must design instruction to that style. Now that is, that is I will, I will say that that is how my mom was taught learning styles. She is a high school foreign language teacher. And that was how those were taught to her. But Leslie, I'll let you. I'll let you elaborate. 

Leslie Early  18:59  
Well, yeah, as a teacher, I also was very familiar with this - might even call it a pedagogy. But I was very familiar with this theory of learning styles. And I sort of always interpreted it as, there's multiple ways that people learn. And I always try to do like a shotgun approach of like, you know, I'm gonna cover this material in multiple different ways, deliver it in multiple different ways. And then hope that net is cast. And people or the students learn in whichever way is easiest for them, or at least they pick it up in different ways and try to integrate it, you know, for whichever way is best for them. But as I was like, sort of looking into this, that I was essentially a non-essentialist believer in learning styles, but there are essentialists. And I think that's where you get into trouble because essentialist people who believe this essentially to be true about learning styles will, they will, depending on each student, they kind of label each student as having whichever learning style. And then only or try to mostly teach in that learning style to that student. So that the students not getting exposed to you know, if you decide this is a visual learner, then you're going to give them a lot of visual stimuli and not so much verbal or tactile stimuli, which is a detriment to that student.

Heidi Kirby  20:38  
Right.

Leslie Early  20:39  
I think that's where the main issue is, it's not that yes, we can all agree maybe that people can learn things in different ways, or have a preference for learning. 

Heidi Kirby  20:49  
Yes, I love that word. That's what I always say

Leslie Early  20:53  
Yeah, it's like a preference, but that we're not over emphasizing it. And we're not excluding people from learning in other ways, just because we've labeled them as a certain type of learner. So that's my two cents on that.

Heidi Kirby  21:08  
Absolutely, yes, no, I remember, I got my masters in curriculum and instruction. And we'd learned - we talked all about learning styles. And then I went on for my PhD in instructional design. And one of the first classes I had was like, "learning styles are a myth," and I was like, "Whoa, hit the brakes. What?" And so basically, the argument in that class was that, like you said, for the essentialists, that there is not only one way that people learn, for most people, they can learn multiple different ways. Like you said, they just have a preference, right? And, you know, for me, it was reflecting on my own experience, where I am terrible when someone is lecturing. And I'm just sitting there listening. I don't retain a lot of information at all, does that mean I can't? No. And especially as I've gotten older, I listen to podcasts a lot now. And that's something that if I was really gung ho  that my learning style was visual, I wouldn't be able to sit there and listen to a podcast and retain anything, right? I was still able to listen to lectures, and I would just write down, you know, people would make fun of my notes, but I'd write down almost everything that I could capture that the person was saying, because that's how I best retain the information for me. But writing stuff wasn't in those big three learning styles. So I was like, I don't know what I am. Because I write stuff down. Like, that's a big part of how I learn. So I always found them a little problematic for that, because I'm like, I guess I'm visual, because I have to see my own words. But like, it was very much more what I learned about the idea of multiple intelligences. So like the, there's the big three, right, like visual, tactile, audio, but then there's also like inter- and intra-personal, where you learn better by yourself or with others. And then there's like verbal, musical, natural, and then there's just all these other that describe the preferences that people have for learning. And I'm definitely a verbal and a musical learner. And that made so much more sense to me when I learned about those because it was so much more multifaceted. And I think if people want to teach and reach a lot of different preferences to maybe go with that model instead because it's got so much more that it offers in terms of, you know, reaching people. And I remember to when I told my mom, I was like, "Mom, you've got to read this article that learning styles are a myth," she was like, appalled.. And luckily, she was pretty non-essentialist. She just thought that she had to teach all three different ways all the time. And so you know, oh,  I gotta have all the variety. Yeah, it was a very interesting conversation to have with her. But I I think I convinced her that like this - I like how you put it the essentialist view of learning styles is like, it's pretty outdated. From the research I've looked at, they haven't found any hard solid evidence that suggests that there's only one way people write retain information.

Leslie Early  24:35  
Right. And, and the danger of anything essentialist though, is that when people take it too far, you know, essential, real essential, essentialists about learning styles - they believe that your learning style is unmovable. Like it does not change. You inherit it. So like you're basically born with this, and you can't change it and depending on what learning style you have, it can affect your brain functioning, and it can predict your academic and career success. So - and the most essentialists are people in early childhood, early education. So like, from pre-K through elementary, we're talking and probably lower Elementary. So they're looking at these little, little kids, you know, toddlers to like second grade, and they're saying, I already have predicted your academic and career success because I've labeled you a certain type of learner. And I'm only going to teach to that learning style. Like,  you're you're depriving these kids of so much opportunity for learning at that point, and giving them the benefit of the doubt. So I think that's where the real danger of being an essentialist in this learning style debate presents itself. 

Heidi Kirby  25:54  
Well, and when you put it that way, and you think about early childhood, I mean, the way that you just described learning styles is almost directly, to me, in opposition of like, the Montessori method, right? Where you kind of let the kid decide where and how and what they want to learn. But then it's also kind of opposite of even just like we were talking earlier, project-based learning, where it's like that exploration and, you know, a lot of autonomous learning doesn't fit into a learning style. Right? So it makes it problematic just in that, I think,

Leslie Early  26:32  
Yeah, because it gives, it's from the old, I think it's the old school model of teaching where the teacher is, you know, delivering the knowledge. You know, I have all the knowledge and I'm delivering it, but I think that's also why there's a misconception in l&d about what teachers do. Because when these people were children, that's probably the educational experience they had. But it's changed a lot. I mean, the teacher as facilitator is the new thing, you know, like, yeah, or it should be that's kind of the goal of like, the teachers not bestowing knowledge anymore. The teacher is like helping students learn how to learn, basically. So yeah, and so learning styles don't work, because it's not the teachers responsibility to be like, I'm only going to give you visual input, because I think that's, that's how you learn best.

Heidi Kirby  27:21  
Yeah, that's a great point. Because I mean, think about all the technology that we are able to use now. Like, what is VR? What learning style is it? It's all of them.

Leslie Early  27:31  
It's all three. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. And it can be musically - it can be be all of it. Yeah- 

Heidi Kirby  27:40  
Yeah. You could put yourself out in nature. Yeah. I'm definitely not an essentialist. I do think people have learning preferences. I prefer to like, listen to a podcast or watch a video. or read, I'm a big reader.

Leslie Early  27:56  
I really hate when someone reads something out loud to me. 

Heidi Kirby  28:00  
Yes, it's so hard for me. 

Leslie Early  28:02  
Or if somebody tells me something like, you know, somebody will say, you know, on Saturday, I have to do this or that at this time. If you just tell me that, I am not going to remember it. But if you write it down, show it to me and I can look or even better if I write it myself somewhere. Yeah, and I see it, then I'm much more likely to remember it. Is that enough for me to say, Oh, I'm a visual learner? I don't think so. But for whatever reason, that that's the way that I can get it into my memory. But yeah, in one ear out the other is is a big deal for me.

Heidi Kirby  28:38  
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It used to baffle me when my students in college would like, type everything into their phones. I'm like, you don't have like a little notebook. seeing things in my own handwriting helps me retain information so much better. So much better...

Leslie Early  28:54  
But I think again, I just think that... we're learning so much about how the brain organizes information. So the fact that you're using your own handwriting, like you have a whole huge developed section of your brain dedicated to your own handwriting, that's like highly interconnected, and probably spans over multiple parts of your brain. So that is a schema that you have already worked years and years develop in your brain. So by putting information in that handwriting that you're so familiar with, I'm sure it just makes it so much easier for your brain to be like, "Well, I know where to put this." But if it's a form of text, and it's just generic, you know, and it's, you don't have that personal rich connection already built in your mind around it. Then of course, your brain is going to be like, "mmm, I don't know. It's like junk mail." Right? Like, I don't know where this goes but yeah. So I mean, in that sense, it makes sense to me that, you know, writing in handwrite in your own handwriting is easier for you to remember, but the brain is mysterious, we're still learning is still learning so much about it. So...

Heidi Kirby  30:04  
And I think that's a big point too is like, be open, right? Like we are technically, in a technology field in instructional design. And so like, we have to be open with new technology, we have to be open with new research that comes out about neuroscience and cognitive load. And like, that's, that's kind of the point I want to make is like, just be open, right? Things change. And we have to change with it. Yeah.

Leslie Early  30:33  
Andyou know, it's interesting when you see people talking about it, and then your initial reaction might be "no, that's not there's no way that can be true." But then to just pause and be like, "Well, let me read a little bit more about this and see what the research is really saying." 

Heidi Kirby  30:50  
On that note, my last question for you is, if you had to pick one, movie, book, show, piece of media, whatever, to better help people understand - I'm gonna leave it really open for you - you can pick neuroscience, learning myths, any of the things we talked about today, what would you choose as a resource and why?

Leslie Early  31:16  
Hmm, for the learning styles thing, so where I learned about the essential versus non essentialist and like how this can be problematic is actually the American Psychological Association just released a paper last year, called Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental. And they kind of go into more detail about kind of the things that I was talking about, as far as you know, essentialist versus non essentialist followers of this theory.

Heidi Kirby  31:46  
Awesome. Well, we'll share that for sure, and thank you for coming on the show and spending time with me.

Leslie Early  31:52  
Thanks for having me, Heidi. It was a lot of fun.

Heidi Kirby  31:55  
Thanks again for joining me on the BLOC. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai