Make It Stick

Wynveen took their plan to each of the twelve work stations on the line with a simple question: What changes are needed to make this plan work?

Ken Barber, Jiffy Lube International’s manager of learning and development, says training has to be engaging in order to hold employees’ attention. At the time we spoke, Barber was putting the finishing touches on a computer-based simulation game for company managers called “A Day in the Life of a Store Manager.”

Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the process of forgetting.

learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems.

that high-structure classes help students who lack a history of using effective learning techniques and habits to develop them and succeed in rigorous settings.

The instructional role of employees is most dramatically illustrated in what Wynveen calls a Kaizen event. Kaizen is a Japanese term for improvement. It has been central to Toyota Motor Company’s success and has been adopted by many other companies to help create a culture of continuous improvement.

Wenderoth assigns her students to spend ten minutes at the end of each day sitting with a blank piece of paper on which to write everything they can remember from class. They must sit for ten minutes.

When a new employee comes on board, he or she is trained following an instructional sequence of practice and feedback that Wynveen calls “tell—show—do—review.”

One student is selected from each group to give a recitation to the class explaining how the group has answered the question, and then the group’s work is critiqued.