Having Fun Be a Part of Learning

Having fun does not diminish learning capacity or marginalize subject matter. In fact, having fun is likely to make the learning experience more memorable and help the content to stick if it evokes wonder and excitement! Int he world of funology, we are seeing this with the rapid expansion of gamification within the learning and development sphere. It is more than just a catchy buzz term; it is an educational movement that is fast gaining traction in the mainstream because it works.

With fun, you stop the clock-watching, the sneaky email-checking, and the classroom snoozing. Because if we are doing it right, we will be constantly involving the audience and inviting contributions so they haven’t got time to be distracted by other things. Fun is, therefore, a conduit to learning, focus, and retention.

Moreover, we can use fun as a distraction TO the learning rather than a distraction FROM the learning.

How to Engage Any Audience

Here are five tips to engage any audience:

1. Use a pre-training exercise: This sets the scene for creativity and honors those who are there on time. This could be a word puzzle like Hang Man, a number puzzle like Sodoku, a physical puzzle like Pictionary, or a short video used to stimulate interest in the following content.
2. Get them connecting in pairs/small groups: There is safety in the smaller numbers, and some participants will need to build confidence in smaller groups first before sharing with the group at large.
3. Recognize their experience and use it: The best trainers harness the experience of the whole group rather than just their own. An experience line-up can be a quick way to identify the levels of experience in the room, and then you can encourage table regroupings based on a more diverse mix of experience levels. For instance, in the activity “Experience Pods,” you could ask the class to form new table groups with a minimum combined experience of 15 years per table.
4. Chunk into bite-sized pieces: This has been a tenant of effective education for many years. We don’t want to overwhelm the participants, so we break the content down into more digestible pieces. This, therefore, provides a perfect opportunity to inject fun in the form of quizzes, polls, problem-solving tasks, team-building activities, gallery walks, and poster development as a way to promote retention and reinforcement and check for understanding as you go.
5. Involve the audience early and often: If they are not playing, they are straying, so seek opportunities to involve the group in the flow of content. This could be in the form of self-reflective tasks like action planning and consideration of things to “start, stop, and continue,” small-group activities such as poster tasks and table discussions, and whole-group involvement through debates and sit-stand polls.

We have more to distract us than at any other time in human history: text messages, instant messages, push notifications, and any number of other alerts finding their way to our mobile devices and wearable technology. Now is not the time to be drilling down on which canon of classics should be the focus for our students. Rather, we should be concentrating on funology and how we keep them engaged and consider how to leverage their existing devices and current preferences for consuming media. If we can create dynamic and meaningful learning opportunities that tap into fun and enjoyment we can truly teach anything.