It’s time to bring back the joy of learning.
Consider how we learned as children. We touched everything, tasted everything, played with everything, asked questions about everything. All our senses were engaged in a process of discovering the world around us.
Then we went through formal education and learned to sit still for hours. We learned that the teacher expected certain answers, even if our experience of the world was different from the answer they were asking for. We learned to fit in, be good and do as we were told.
Well some of us learned these things!
Our modern industrialized education system has transformed the quality of life for billions of people worldwide. There is a clear correlation between how educated a person is and how much income they make. Uneducated people have less opportunity, are less healthy and live more difficult and shorter lives than those who have the privilege of being educated.
Most education systems are designed to prepare people for a job. The assumption underlying this system is that when a student graduates, there will be a job and a career waiting for them. But what happens when the job you have spent decades preparing for is becoming obsolete? What began as an exciting prospect with high hopes ended up being a nightmare with jobs becoming more and more difficult to obtain and the skills taught by formal education are not the ones needed to be successful in a changed world.
What would happen if we changed the way we educated people? What if we encouraged creativity, imagination, and thinking for yourself? What is we taught our children how to be successful, how to do a job and how to create jobs for others? What if we taught them about relationships, money, and business?
Even more important, what if we educated people in a way that matched how they learn?
We created Zone Learning and Zone Teaching to optimize the teacher, student relationship in such a ways as to accelerate the learning. More can be learned in less time, with a better retention and recall, and ultimately a better application of what is learned. Education is only as good as your ability to apply it.
Zone Learning is a way of teaching that taps the natural genius of the student. Rather than being told what to think, we encourage how to think for yourself. When you are told what to think, your natural tendency is to resist. When you do your own thinking, come to your own conclusions and make your own decisions, you feel empowered and in charge of your own destiny.
When your ability to shape your own future goes from a concept to a certainty, an amazing thing happens. Your eyes open wide with wonder, you become eager, enthusiastic and motivated to learn, experiment and apply. Fear of failure diminishes and a willingness to learn from mistakes replaces cautious, slow compliance. Instead of looking for the one right answer, in order to avoid being wrong, you can see many alternative answers that, depending on the circumstances can all be right.
Traditional classrooms have rows of chairs and tables with the teacher at the front with a lectern. These days, blackboards have been replaced with whiteboards, flipcharts and projectors or TV’s to display slide content and videos. the environment is constructed in a way that encourages individual learning, one way delivery and grading of right answers through testing.
This is old! Boring! Ineffective!
Today, we have social media, personal smart phones, music videos are ubiquitous, internet searching, buying, delivery, automation, robots and droids, worldwide delivery, easily accessible global travel. Surely we can reinvent the classroom?
Zone Learning is about reinventing the classroom and the educational experience to make it fun, exciting, stimulating and effective.
It’s all about including the whole person in the process and engaging all your senses, igniting your joy of learning and discovery, and inspiring the you to think, feel and operate holistically and to include your; spiritual, mental, emotional and physical dimensions.
Hyper-Speed Experiential Learning
The above diagram demonstrates what is possible in terms of retention of information based on the mode of learning. It is obvious to most people that the more actively engaged a student is and the more of themselves that are included in the experience the more they learn and the less they forget.
Let’s bring back the joy of learning!
At Goldzone Education, we believe that the world has changed so fast that traditional ways of teaching and learning are too slow and ineffective. People of all ages are immersed in high-definition movies, television, video games, giant monitors, instant messaging, smartphones and smartwatches.
Our methods of teaching, delivering content and
learning have got to change with the times.
We need exciting content and teachers who inspire us to make changes, be the best we can be and to realize our full potential.
Every Goldzone program we deliver uses small group discussions, massive video screens, nightclub quality surround sound, laser lights, image reinforcement, captivating images, inspiring videos, the most beautiful smells and most important of all dynamic facilitation.
It is never boring!
Large corporations have the budgets to invest in one-off learning environments for their corporate training, however few of them build purpose-built classrooms on this scale. As for small and medium businesses, they are mostly out of reach. Our vision is to change that. We need better quality programs and learning environments for the hundreds of millions of small businesses around the world. think of the possible impact…
We also need to unlearn old ideas, thoughts, and information that is no longer relevant. Read more about unlearning and “clean slate” > here.
Leadership Advocate and Co-Founder of the Goldzone Group. I help leaders to master the new rules of leadership for the new economy. Over the past 30 years, I have visited more than 500 cities in 54 countries to explore, learn from, and help many of the world’s leading companies, leaders, and luminaries in science, technology, health, finance, and entrepreneurship.