16 Top Highlights from How Humans Learn

What does it take to be a great leader?

Not much. Just everything you have. 

Even on the best days, coaching is one of the most challenging things in the world to do well. And that’s partially because of how complex the human brain is. To be a great coach, teacher, manager, or mentor you have to understand how humans learn—and that’s something most people don’t know. Understanding how to onboard a new hire or upskill a sales rep so they can master a new tool is harder than you might realize, since humans forget 87% of what they learn from traditional learning methods within a month. 

The desire to be a successful coach, teacher, manager, boss, and CEO is what drew me to the book How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching by Joshua R. Eyler. 

This eye-opening read takes a look behind the curtain into developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insights into leading research on how learning truly works. And it reveals how the power of play is a necessary ingredient for learning. 

The book is authored by Joshua Eyler, Ph.D., who is the Director of Faculty Development and the Director of the Thinkforward Quality Enhancement Plan at the University of Mississippi, where he also serves on the faculty in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. Joshua has devoted much of his life and career to writing about teaching and learning, and his book has been described as “a splendid repository of ways to rethink how we teach” by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

So if you’re like me and you want to teach in a way that’s effective and makes learning stick, then read on for my top highlights from How Humans Learn:

My top three highlights: 

1. Without play our learning is hindered, and we are unable to function at our highest levels.
2. We learn from failure. The good news is that failure can be one of our biggest allies in learning when it’s utilized appropriately because our brains are designed to find and construct knowledge from error.
3. Despite its predominance in classrooms across the country, prolonged lecturing is one of our most inauthentic and ineffective teaching strategies.

All of my highlights:

• Humans appear to have an “innate biological need for novelty” that is linked directly to curiosity.
• One important way humans learn is through playful interactions with others. In fact, play is a necessary component for many different kinds of learning.
• Some benefits children get from play include gaining emotional maturity and analytical skills, both of which enhance our ability to learn. The lasting effects of a playful childhood follow us as we grow up and shape how we learn and behave as adults.
• While playing games, students are engaged in a learning process. When games are designed well, students build strong connections to course content that helps them retain and retrieve information over the long term.
• Students are willing to invest their time into playing games because they are intrinsically motivated to do so by genuine interest, excitement, and fun. As a result, they are often learning without even realizing it.
• During play the brain is making sense of itself through simulation and testing, meaning play helps to sculpt the brain. Play gives us the freedom to try new things without threatening our physical or emotional well-being. We are safe precisely because we are just playing.
• eLearning fails because it is not social enough. It does not give people room to play.
• “When we make mistakes, our brains spark and grow. Mistakes are the only opportunities for learning, as students consider the mistakes but also times when our brains grow even if we don’t know we have made a mistake.” — Joe Boler
• The main thing we need to do as teachers is to tap into the capability for play. A successful deployment of failure-based pedagogies thus depends on two related strategies:
  • Preparing students to learn from failure
  • Designing opportunities where students can fail and then subsequently build conceptual understanding as a result of this process.
• There’s a concept called “desirable difficulties” which describes a series of techniques designed to help students learn new information more effectively.
• Like many practices that employ desirable difficulties, you’ll find that students experience minor episodes of failure and frustration while experiencing difficulties, but research clearly shows that the learning we gain from desirable difficulties far outweighs the short-term setbacks.
• However, to the extent that students are able to use their prior knowledge to generate suboptimal or even incorrect solutions to the problem, the process can be productive in preparing students to learn more effectively from subsequent instruction.
• What matters most is the quality of our failures.

These are my biggest highlights from How Humans Learn.

Think you’re an expert on how humans learn after reading this? Then I challenge you to email me your favorite highlight and why, and I will send you access to the How Humans Learn game, which has just been added to 1Huddle’s on-demand Game Shop. The game covers these 16 highlights plus many more, and it’s guaranteed to spark your curiosity, excitement, and the sense of play we all need more of.

Want access? Email me at sam@1huddle.co. And if you’re already a client who’s ready to add How Humans Learn to your game library, just email your customer success manager to get the game added today.