3861: [Part 2] Use Schema Learning to Be More Persuasive by Tyler Tervooren of Riskology on Practical Psychology

This is Optimal Living Daily. Use schema learning to be more persuasive part two by Tyler Tovoren over Schology.co and I'm Justin Mollick. Welcome to OLD where I read articles to you with permission from the authors, but today being a continuation from yesterday, so recommend listening to yesterday's episode first. But if you're all caught up, let's get right to part two and continue optimizing your life.

Use schema learning to be more persuasive part two by Tyler Tovoren over Schology.co. How to best harness the power of schemas number two, activate prior knowledge. Schema learning works best when you're not the one doing the work. For success, make the learner build a connection.

To do that, ask lots of questions that activate their existing knowledge so they can build a mental bridge from one to the other. This tactic is not just for teaching, though. It's deadly effective for persuasion. For years, there's been debate raging about global warming and its effect on the planet.

According to basically all established science, it's real and it's bad. Yet there's a vocal minority who refused to accept it and instead try to persuade others to accept their argument. A good example of this is when US Representative Steve Stockman uses the schema of ice melting in water to explain why there's no reason to worry about the sea level rising. The problem, of course, is the schema is wrong.

It doesn't reflect reality. But people who follow Representative Stockman and aren't interested in physics probably won't catch that. Now, how do you show someone who uses that argument that their science is wrong? Just explaining it probably won't do the trick.

A comedian John Stewart from The Daily Show found an effective way. Stewart uses the same schema as Representative Stockman, but he updates it with a critical addition to show how global warming actually works. Everyone has drunk a glass of ice water before, so their existing knowledge is immediately activated and the demonstration forces you to accept it as the truth. Number three, ask for more examples.

When you were a kid, your teacher has probably asked you to create your own explanations for how things work. I remember a lesson from high school calculus about calculating the swing of a pendulum. Math has never been my strength, but I always grasped it when I could clearly connect it to a real world scenario I understood. In this case, our teacher was using the swing of the pendulum on a grandfather clock to illustrate.

But it wasn't hitting home. We all knew what grandfather clocks were and that their time was kept by a pendulum, but we didn't care. We were 17 year olds and it was the 21st century. Grandfather clocks were irrelevant 100 years ago.

The teacher noticed we weren't engaged and asked a smart question. Where else does this apply? Someone said, construction cranes. Another said, playground swings.

Not only were we showing our teacher we understood and strengthening our connection to the lesson by coming up with more schemas, we instantly became more engaged because she allowed us to find an application for it that we cared about. Not that swings are that special to me, but they were more interesting than a grandfather clock at the time. If you've ever struggled to communicate something that feels like it should be important but no one seems to care, there's a lesson here. You're not connecting it to something that matters to your audience.

And number four, check for mastery. When I started my first real job in college, I'd taken a class on how to create a construct construction schedule, what contractors to schedule at what times and when to do which types of work. I thought I understood it, then I created a schedule for a real project. Sitting down with the superintendent, we mapped out the plan to remodel part of a hospital.

Everything was going great, then two weeks in, something went wrong and the project came to a grinding halt. I was unprepared and had no idea what to do. I didn't plan for the plan not working. When you're trying to make a message stick, a schema will plan to seed, but what makes the seed grow is when the person it stuck in can build on it themselves to become a master.

Your job isn't really done until you've left someone with the ability to take what you've showed them and turn it into something of their own. The zow idea is not only stick, but grow. The lessons aren't just understood, but embraced. The question is, how do you know when you've reached that level?

How to attest to be sure, put it to use in real life. Everything is difficult until you find a practical application for it. You can tell someone has grasped your teaching when you're able to put it to use because there are always complications that come from real world use that you can't account for on paper. Mastery comes when you can solve problems you didn't expect.

I can solve our scheduling dilemma because I never faced a problem like that before. But these kinds of problems are actually very common in the construction world and the superintendent knew exactly what to do. You can teach almost anyone the basics of anything, but you'll take your mission further when you give people real problems to solve. That's when you see if everything they've learned can actually be applied.

That's when you know the knowledge you've transferred is no longer at risk of being lost. Do this in the next 10 minutes. If you want to teach something, convey an important message or persuade someone to believe what you believe, schema learning is one of the fastest and most effective ways to do it. Here's a recap of what you should focus on as you incorporate schemas into your own Number one, make it personal.

Don't assume anyone knows anything. Kater, your schemas to knowledge that the person you're teaching already has a good grasp on. Number two, activate prior knowledge. Your message will sink in when it can be deeply connected to what's already understood.

Number three, mask for more examples. Your message will stick when there are multiple paths to remembering it. And number four, check for mastery. Your message will grow stronger when the people using it can adjust it to work in many real world conditions.

Ask yourself these questions to clarify your message and make it stronger when you share it. What is the overarching message I want to leave people to? What are some common knowledge examples or schemas I can compare it to? What are the specific connections I can use to show the comparison?

And how can I check for mastery? Practice these principles and your message will spread far. You just listened to part two of the post titled, use schema learning to be more persuasive by Tyler Tovarn of riskology.co and I'll be right back with my commentary. If they get a Tyler, I do think these tips work, making it personal, activating prior knowledge, asking for more examples and checking for mastery.

And for me, the mastery bar is massive. I started teaching myself to code apps, mobile apps. I shouldn't say teaching myself. I did buy a couple of online courses showing some basic stuff.

And it was nice to go through the examples. They showed me how to get around the software, where to type the code in, where to put images and stuff like that. But that was all using their code and their examples as a starting point. Once I started trying to make my own apps from scratch.

That's when the learning curve really took off because that's when I would hit roadblocks and have to figure out my way around it, solve the problem and learn more in the process. After that happened over and over again, it started to become second nature. And that's how we all learn, right? Kids learn to walk by taking a step, falling or hitting a roadblock, you could say, getting back up, trying again, falling again, and so on.

It could be a painful experience. But that's how it goes. But there are little tricks here and there that can help as we heard in this post. And of course, it'll take a little practice to implement these ideas in our own lives.

So even with this, just go one step at a time. So take that step, have a great day, and I'll see you tomorrow, where you're optimal life. I'll wait.