Week 5 Final Assignment PSY331 1

“The Importance of Understanding Your Learners’ Needs”
Maria Peterson
PSY 331 Psychology of Learning
Instructor: Corey Pruitt
November 10, 2014

THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTANDING YOUR LEARNERS’ NEEDS
This training module is specifically designed for your organization and tailored to meet your individual manager’s learning styles to enhance their leadership skills. The training module is geared for your managers to meet the learning needs of their departmental employees so that they become the nucleus of this organization. We are the experts in this field, why? Because we don’t simply train your managers’ our training module build high functioning teams, starting with management. We believe that training adults, especially those in managerial positions, is a science. We use principles from the following areas of learning psychology; Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructive and Humanitarian into our training modules.
I have put together a training module proposal that I feel would help you in meeting the needs of all your departmental employees and at the same assist the managers in gainful knowledge of the various learning styles, obtain skills on scaffolding knowledge within themselves and those employees they are responsible for and learn how to brilliantly use operant conditioning as a tool that will engage your employee’s in the company’s vision, deliver results in revenue, execution, employee retention and productivity. We realize that some managers can be apprehensive to change, which is quite normal. We welcome apprehension and by the end of the training, we guarantee that each of your managers will have the confidence, knowledge and skills to motivate and lead their departmental employees.
This training module will not only help your managers understand your departmental employees better and give you specific insights on behavior of employees, their leadership skills, but they will know how positive behaviors and positive learning environments , or negative environments and behaviors impacts your team’s performance, team climate and overall team productivity. We believe that managers need to understanding the importance of how their team learns and the importance of their employees’ learning styles and needs. Therefore, we dive deep into Multiple Intelligence theory. Your employees possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember, perform, and understand new concepts in different ways, so we will work with your managers to understand the different domains of multiple intelligences and how to use them to your advantage. This Training modules includes exercises that incorporate all eight multiple intelligence theories starting with; Bodily-kinesthetic which teaches through physical activity, hands-on learning (training) and using tools, equipment and real objects found in your warehouse. Musical intelligence is a sensitivity to rhythm and sound. While they love music, they are also sensitive to sounds in their environments (your warehouse). Using tools such a listening to music while at work can increase productivity. We will help your managers understand Interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences and how critical these are to a manager’s repertoire. Managers will learn (interpersonal) how understanding and interacting with others is key to building a solid team through interaction, empathy and using their individual street smarts to get the desired employee behavior and productivity your organization strives for. We will have group activities, classroom lectures and interactive dialogue using tools that you use within your organization that include telephone, audio conferencing, time and attention from the instructor, video conferencing, writing, computer conferencing and e-mail.
Another critical and important component of the training module is that your manager’s need to understand is the spatial intelligence that use visual and are good at visualizing and are often good with directions, charts, videos or pictures. Your managers will also spend time on themselves and reflect on how they work with others and understanding their own interests and goals (Intrapersonal) by tuning into their own inner feelings, their intuition, motivation and knowledge base in order to build on their own personal drive and confidence, as well as their team. We have designed a short independent study for each manager that will have reflection and encourages self-analysis and using the linguistic intelligence for your managers who have highly developed auditory skills and who often think in words, we have a variety of recommended and acclaimed books that your managers can access, free of charge as part of this training module. Emotional Intelligence by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves (2009), Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek (2014) or The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy by Jon Gordon and Ken Blanchard (2007) to name a few.
After reviewing your organization’s portfolio, we realize that a majority of your managers highly academic and rank in the Logical -Mathematical intelligence. People with this intelligence like to think conceptually, use calculations, be detailed and use abstract thinking to solve problems so, we have designed a track that will build (scaffold) off from this trait to explore learning and forming concepts so they can work more comprehensively with details. We will merge five major principles of theory through innovative training that will best meet your diverse learners ' needs and give your management team tools to design a cooperative and supportive learning environment that will enhance employee morale.
As an experience company, we have studied employee behaviors extensively and have perfected our training module designs to meet any organization’s needs by meeting managerial and employee needs through psychological principles of theory. For example, behaviorism is primarily concerned with observable and measurable aspects of human behavior to emphasize changes in behavior that result from stimulus-response associations made by the learner. While each manager comes with their own unique schema, we build on that to achieve the desired behavior but also create a mechanism for a reward response that will evoke praise, continued feedback and positive reinforcement. “Behaviorism is a scientific approach to psychology that is distinguished by its underlying logical-theoretical emphasis as it seeks to develop explanations of behavior (Moore, 2013).” All employees come to this company with enthusiasm and the desire to work for this company, so the opportunity to empower your employees with positive reinforcement and not negative reinforcement will not only help them be more productive, but will bring forth the desired outcome or behavior of happy and productive employees. This training module will help your managers lead by example and accomplishing tasks to high standards.
We will also spend some time on constructivism theory that supports and encourages your managers to put together ideas based upon evidence and information at hand which is based on the experiences and prior knowledge of your employees. “Constructivism provides a model emphasizing the importance of the interface between individual and experience (Bowers, 2014)” by looking at how they will respond to new knowledge and/or learning. The group that we will be training already have rich experiences and diverse backgrounds in the business, however, through this training module we will scaffold onto those experiences by using multiple methods of interaction, information, problem solving and reflection. In order for the group to feel a part of the organization, we propose to have them be a part of sales project that builds on their existing knowledge and then provide extensive training of the organizations marketing, production, vision and profit margins. This will help them make choices in their leadership styles/ behavior and provide clear ‘next steps’ for development on their project. This type of training creates climates of drive, execution, encouragement and innovation while widening their repertoire of personal experiences through social negotiation. I am confident that your employees will gain extensive understanding of your company and will in turn engage them in the organization’s strategic objectives, winning their commitment and willingness to go above and beyond because they were given the learning tools to willingly proceed. Managers will be trained in helping the group reach consensus and with getting employees to generating new ideas and problem solving skills.
Another theory we weave throughout the module is cognitivism that focuses on understanding individual schema’s (experience, prior knowledge and memory) of people, this will give your managers skills in the knowledge base of how to build employee’s schema’s to create new schema’s that are conducive to your organization’s vision and mission. Another way of understanding cognitivism is ‘instead of existing first and foremost to solve logic problems, cognition here has the primary evolved role of connecting the human organism sensitively and adaptively to its ecosocial environment (obtaining and preparing food, staying warm and dry in bad weather, and making common cause in politics, business, or romance) are paradigm examples of this view which can be called adaptive intelligence (Atkinson, 2012).”
One of the key components of all the training modules is providing your managers the skills to create an effective learning environment and touch on your employee’s humanism, the psychological approach that emphasizes on the study of the whole person. This will provide your managers skills, or reinforce their existing skills to be self-directed that will help produce employees who want and know how to learn, because the best kind of (meaningful) evaluation is self-evaluation which is critical in the adult learning process. We stress the importance that modules are employee centered and personalized to draw on their internal motivation and, through this training, upper management will know each manager’s area of interest and in turn, your managers will know each of their employees areas of interest. This particular training is effective in helping managers not only understand themselves and their leadership abilities, but gives them the skills to help the employees understand themselves and their potential. Through motivational reward, your employees will not only want to do more, they will have more ownership and belief in your vision because your manager’s are trained on focusing on the professional growth of employees that creates trust and harmony throughout the organization.
After reading about all the different theories and multiple intelligences that the training modules use, and finding out that within your organization, everyone has a different learning style, you might be thinking it is impossible to meet the need of all the different learning styles of your managers in a cohesive, efficient and effective manner. Each of our previous clients have thought that very thing and some even felt overwhelmed. However, as we move into using a mix of multimedia, projects, team building and developing positive behaviors to obtain the required outcome, using proven psychological methods that are in this training module, we guarantee that you will see a difference in the first quarter of sales due to employee productivity. After years of perfecting this module and testing a variety of tools to reinforce our module, we have come up the tools that appropriate to every learning style. We focus on learner characteristics as media may be differentially effective for different learners. We do not use a cookie cutter approach, but rather we use and identifying the media that best suits different types of learners and use several models within each track of the training module.
While we assume most of your managers have good reading abilities, we also know that in some organizations this is not the case, so we factor in for that and tailor the training module for individuals with poorer reading habits or levels by using other forms of tools that benefit from speaking rather writing because they understand spoken words, so if your manager’s do have employees on their team that may not possess higher logical and mathematical or logical intelligence, we provide other forms of multimedia tools that scaffold onto their strengths to get the same desired outcome. Our training modules can be used both on-site or in their home setting, or both. We strive to meet all the learning outcomes of verbal information, enhancing motor skills and attitudes, intellectual skills and cognitive strategies with end result of delivering highly effective management that leads a team of highly effective employees who become the nucleus of your organization.

References
Wilson, J. F. (2013). Biological Basis of Behavior. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
Moore, J. (2013). THREE VIEWS OF BEHAVIORISM. Psychological Record, 63(3), 681. doi:10.11133/j.tpr.2013.63.3.020
Atkinson, D. (2012). Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics Review, 3(2), 211-232. doi:10.1515/applirev-2012-0010
Bowers, J., Gruver, J., & Trang, V. (2014). Radical Constructivism: A Theory of Individual and Collective Change? Constructivist Foundations, 9(3), 310-312.

References: Wilson, J. F. (2013). Biological Basis of Behavior. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. Moore, J. (2013). THREE VIEWS OF BEHAVIORISM. Psychological Record, 63(3), 681. doi:10.11133/j.tpr.2013.63.3.020 Atkinson, D. (2012). Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics Review, 3(2), 211-232. doi:10.1515/applirev-2012-0010 Bowers, J., Gruver, J., & Trang, V. (2014). Radical Constructivism: A Theory of Individual and Collective Change? Constructivist Foundations, 9(3), 310-312.