Bob Pike’s Five Adult’s Learning Laws

Adrián Cottín — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 12:52:30 +0000

I am honored to present to you Bob Pike’s Five Adult’s Learning Laws!

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” – George Bernard Shaw

Robert «Bob» Pike is one of the most creative and successful trainer of trainers and expert in talent development recognized worldwide. He is the author of the book “Creative Training Techniques Handbook: Tips, Tactics, and How-To’s for Delivering Effective Training” ISBN-10: 0874257239 ISBN-13: 978-0874257236 , as well as the principles of adult learning, known as Bob Pike’s Five Laws which will be shown below:

First Law: Adults are babies in big bodies.

In the same way children do, adults can learn by actively involving in the learning experience, especially trough the games.

Adults enjoy playing as much as children do, but this does not mean they have to be treated like infants, on the contrary, this could be self-defeating, even disrespectful.

What facilitators need to do is designing learning experiences that activate the learners’ right hemisphere, which attend to emotions, feelings, creativity and artistic abilities.

Second Law: People don’t argue with their own information.

When working with adults learning, it’s very important to take into account the wealth of prior experience they have and that must be acknowledge, honored and celebrated.

Adults accept the new information when they can get the answer by themselves and they can correct their own mistakes during the learning experience. They prefer the facilitator to show them rather than to explain. It´s necessary for them to experience the learning.

So the job for the facilitator, is to develop activities that generate ideas and concepts in the individuals, rather than giving them information to be remembered.

But, the most important job of the facilitator to guide their students’ learning is asking questions on learning outcome (content) as well as their process of thinking. By asking questions, it’s possible to elicit discussions about solutions to a problem, engage students in dynamic thinking and learning and draw their own conclusions.

It’s necessary to produce a lot of questions to get all the information from the learner, by using different strategies every 8 eight minutes (Bob Pike’s 90-20-8 rule).

Questions are even more important than the answers.

Third Law: Learning is directly proportional to the fun you have.

Different researches have shown that people learn better when they are in an environment that offers them joy, humor, pleasure and fun, which does not mean learning is not a serious issue.

This rule is connected to the first one. Learning can be enhanced if we include games in our learning experiences, especially group games. We can work with pairs, trios, quartets or with the whole class.

Games and joy are together and both of them stimulate students’ imagination, and help them to adapt and develop the problem solving ability. It also fosters empathy, compassion and trust among them.

The more relaxed participants are, the more opened to learning they are.

Fourth Law: Learning has not occurred if behavior has not changed.

We cannot measure the learning itself, but the behaviors related with it, which means that if learning has occurred, there must be a behavioral change.

When the learning has taken place, adults start to performance differently: they ask for more information related to the learned issue, they read books they had not read before, they apply what they learned, and they are willing to share what they have learned (even in their social networks).

Their body language also indicates that the learning has occurred: they look relaxed, they are more active and participant during the activities and make their presence felt.

Fifth Law: You know how much you have learned when it’s your turn to teach others.

Teaching others, is a good way to measure what we have learned. Experiences that give the students the opportunity to practice a new skill increase the probability of retention and application of the new knowledge.

When teaching others, we consolidate our knowledge and dominate the subject in greater depth than when we are taught.

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Bob Pike’s Five Adult’s Learning Laws