Living in my own little world of not learning
After graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree, I thought that was the end of my education. At the time, I had not heard of lifelong learning. I thought that once you go into the workforce, you don’t go back to studying. Studying after you start working is a step back – or so I was brought up to believe.
I was so wrong.
For 12 years I didn’t really take any courses, except for the occasional compliance or data privacy course. I went from media to finance to education without upskilling, so lifelong learning wasn’t something in my radar.
So what changed?
I transitioned to curriculum development for enrichment centres, mainly focusing on language learning. And while my lesson design was all right (that was when I started crafting escape room lessons), I was going on instinct. It was intuition that led me to structure my lessons, but I didn’t know why it worked.
So that’s when I enrolled for ACTA (ACLP, for those of you who aren’t super old like me) – to beef up my instructional design skills.
It was quite a shock.
Eating my own dog food
The transformation from teacher to learner was jarring. For very long, I had been the one writing worksheets and designing lessons for other people to learn – but I had never been on the receiving end of learning before.
It showed me perspectives on learning that I had never considered before – simply because I had not been a real learner for such a long time. It made me realise that to be a better educator, you should always be learning something. Because if you don’t know what it’s like to be a learner, how can you design for other learners?
Eating my dog food – which means to use your products or services, or to practice what you preach – was quite the eye-opener. I went to to take a CELTA, learn Japanese, learn parkour, get a DACE (DDDLP if you’re not super old), and now I’m going on to take a Master in Applied Positive Psychology.
After returning to lifelong learning, I’ve never looked back.
The cost of stagnation
I assumed my skills were good enough for a very long time. And perhaps they sufficed in that era. But the world keeps on changing – it’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. We had a pandemic and everyone had to master online learning.
If the world changes and you don’t, you stagnate. You lose out. You’re no better than the Aedes mosquito that thrives in all that stagnant water you leave out.
It’s not just educators – regardless of your career, continuous professional development is essential to remain effective and relevant.
The experience of learning all over again
Okay I’m super nerdy so when I went back to learn in 2019 – I loved it. I scaled down my work so that I could scale up the time I devoted to learning. I read everything – every research paper, every book, every link that was sent my way.
Being a teacher, I could analyse what I liked about lessons and other educators, and I was exposed to a world of new techniques for improving learning.
Most importantly, I went through the experience of learning. The frustration of being stuck – and whether that’s because of my ability or just lack of communication. The motivation behind it. Knowing myself better, and being a better learning designer, as a result.
And this shouldn’t be surprise. Adults want agency and relevance (Knowles, 1984), so this was an expression of self-concept – an idea of the self constructed from the beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others. I learnt who I was as a learner.
More importantly, I learnt four important principles that I’ve included into my instructional design ever since.
Principle #1: Relevancy or they run away
Learners really don’t care about it if it’s not relevant to them. This also applies to young learners, who learn for the purpose of getting good grades and making their parents proud.
It’s about useful information, not abstract information. So it’s hard to start with things like “the history of instructional design” because it’s not relevant – not at the beginning of the lesson, anyway. It’s only later, when they start questioning the “why” of a particular concept, that you can bring in history to them.
Adults want learning that connects directly to their lives and challenges – so it’s important to align with the readiness to learn and problem-centered learning principles of andragogy (Knowles, 1984).
In a recent storytelling session I had, I started with a very boring “let’s create a template for our story” when all the participants really wanted was to actually tell their story and feel what it was like doing The Moth style storytelling. This made me realise that the relevancy – why this matters right now – was so much more important than the content.
It’s about the framing, rather than the topic itself.
Principle #2: Doing, not just absorbing
No matter what age you are, you learn better by doing than by studying. That’s why you have assignments, you have practice, you have segments where you’re actually doing the work.
It’s Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory in action – that we learn best when we do, reflect, conceptualise, and experiment (Kolb, 1984). When we do, we have an experience to draw on, and we have something to iterate off and from. So building the practice into learning is so important.
For me, this applies even in private coaching sessions. I set a timer for 3 minutes and let the learner apply what I’ve just imparted – be it a Life Audit Wheel or the Assumption Method – and it gives the learner and me more feedback than “did you understand?” ever could.
Principle #3: Be kind
I’m very hard on my learners when it comes to deadlines. After all, I’m being fair – you knew the date, so why didn’t you make it on time?
Then when I was doing my DACE, the time crunch for my final assignment was so bad that I actually stayed over at my workplace to complete my assignment. I slept on the floor when I got tired and I think there were cockroaches who visited me that night.
This is coming from a super nerdy guy who reads all the resources and readings and links.
So I realise that it’s not always about the learner not putting in effort. Sometimes it’s just about… life.
I also observed this for a client that I worked for – they try to eschew tests because of the amount of stress that it gives to learners. No matter how old you are, if you have to go through a test, it means there’s a possibility of failure. There’s a risk. And when there’s a risk, there’s stress.
Stress kills curiosity, because the affective domain of Bloom’s taxonomy reminds us that feelings influence learning deeply (Krathwohl, et al. 1964). So revive that curiosity – with compassion.
So don’t pile on the stress. Be understanding as much as you can. Build in buffer time. offer flexible formats. Learners aren’t intentionally lazy, it’s just that other things get in the way.
Principle #4: Make it fun, because engagement drives stickiness
Fun is fuel. Humour, games, interesting snippets – all these are things that make the learning stick. I mean, the name of this company is literally “Fun to be Smart” – so you know my philosophy about fun.
I hate educators who just drone on and on and read off slides. Come on, it’s a waste of time. It’s also incredibly lazy to design lessons – no matter whether they be Pilates classes or P5 Mathematics modules – that are not engaging. It just shows how little effort goes into the lesson design.
I advocate gamification (of course I do) because it boosts engagement, motivation, and learning outcomes (Deterding, et al. 2011). So add something – a playful challenges, attempting to attack your learners with rulers, a squawking rubber chicken. Make it fun.
Who wants to attend a boring lesson?
There was a Pilates teacher training course where I suggested that the master trainer put different exercises and concepts, written on slips of paper, into a bag. The learners were split up into groups – and each group had to pull out one slip and physically demonstrate that exercise/concept for the other groups to guess. Yes, it was charades in Pilates form – but it was an engaging lesson that activate the competitive side of the leaners and motivate their learning.
Practical tips from lifelong learning lessons
Here’s my tips for integrating what I’ve learnt from lifelong learning into lesson design. It’s more a cheat sheet than anything else, and I’m sure you already incorporate most of it into your learning.
1. Chunk your content
Remember to separate your lesson into segments of 20 minutes, max. Bite-sized modules help with the learning. It also caters to different learning styles – unless your learners are homogenous, there’s bound to be at least one learner who doesn’t like the delivery format you’ve chosen for that segment. Changing activities every 20 minutes helps to be inclusive to all learning styles.
2. Give choices
Humans love autonomy. Even if it’s something as simple as “do you want to complete the feedback form first, or take the group photo first?” Let your learners feel that they have a choice in the matter, rather than being forced to do something against their feel. Autonomy boosts engagement, so this is a secret way of boosting engagement.
Even for kids, I often go – “do you want to do the test, or the fun activity first?” They have to do the test, but framing it as a choice makes it go down so much easier.
3. Use real-world scenarios
Always show how what they’re learning is relevant. Showing the business context is the easiest way, in my opinion. But sharing your own experiences, case studies, and getting learners to share their experiences also helps to show how what they’re learning is applied in the real world.
For me, especially when I teach English, I show them badly written emails I have received (hiding the identity, of course) or horribly phrased social media posts to show them what happens if they don’t learn English.
They get judged, hard.
4. Add reflective moments and spaces to breathe
It’s when you understand the linkages between what you learn, that causes the content to stick. It’s about metacognition, after all. So I always try to integrate the icebreaker activity for workshops into the main task itself – it’s a good callback for when they reflect.
The space to reflect and think about what you’ve learnt is a powerful way of improving the learning.
5. Build in feedback loops
They need to do, but the doing isn’t effective unless they get feedback about what they’re doing.
More importantly, they need good feedback – they need to know why it’s good, what they’re doing right, and what the need more of. So when marking essays, I always make it a point to write down what they did well. I call it “highlights” – because that’s really the highlight of the essay.
6. Use multimedia, toys, and props
This is another expression of the 20-minute segment tip, but showing them the same content but in a different medium helps. It not only caters to different learning preferences – it’s fun.
I have a squawking rubber chicken. For younger learners, it really, really motivates them to learn because they don’t usually meet educators who carry a noisy rubber chicken into class – especially when I pretend the rubber chicken is a puppet and make it “ask” the students questions. It’s quizzing them, but in a different form.
For adult learners – I have different Strengths cards and Positive/Negative Belief cards that I use for my positive psychology sessions. I find it is another medium that engages them and also helps them to reflect in a different way.
Lifelong learning – about lifelong learning
Although these are my learnings on lifelong learning, I acknowledge that I will always be learning more about learning.
I’ll end up discovering new principles about learning design. I’ll find new practical tips to help in education.
The point is – being a learner again didn’t just give me new skills. It gave me a new perspective. It helped me understand that really, the learner comes first.
So now I design for my learners, with my learners in mind, as a learner.
To do that, I’m always learning. I always make sure I’m on a new course, discovering a new skill, or taking up some new hobby where I’m a learner (of course, I take up the courses that I like, not just for the sake of learning).
And if I could offer one motto for learning design, it’s this.
Make learning fun. Because people remember the fun things, and the more remember, the smarter they become.
It’s fun to be smart.
References
Knowles, M. S. (1984). The adult learner: A neglected species (3rd ed.). Gulf Publishing.
Fun to be Smart 
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