Julia Phelan has a Ph.D in Education from UCLA. She worked for over 20 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Research, Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. In 2017 she co-founded To Eleven, an education consulting company focused on bringing all the good ideas about the science of teaching and learning into the mainstream—be that in educational contexts, or other environments in which learning is not always thought of as a science, or thought about much at all.
Julia is an expert in applications of learning science in the workplace, onboarding, assessment, adaptive learning, student success strategies, and developing effective educational experiences (in-person, hybrid, or online).
Her passion is helping organizations and individuals understand and apply learning science principles and practices to make their own learning more effective and efficient.
Because learning is happening everywhere and it's important to get it right. Because it's hard, and also worthwhile!.
As a manager, onboarding a new hire isn’t just about providing manuals and login information, it’s about setting the employee up to operate autonomously in their role and feel comfortable within the organization. To do this, leaders need to emphasize the importance of developing strategic relationships with colleagues across the company who can share critical knowledge, and help contextualize and speed up their learning. There are three keys ways managers can help employees engage in internal networking, and thus boost their productivity, sense of belonging, engagement, and retention: 1) Create a knowledge map that shows who knows what within the company; 2) Create a prioritized networking list of people they should meet and why; and 3) Initiate relationship building to facilitate connections for your new employee.
A great onboarding experience can keep new hires engaged and committed, and increase their learning and preparedness for their new role. In trying to ensure new employees feel supported and properly prepared, some organizations flood new hires with far too much information. Even if managers have the best intentions, bombarding new hires with tasks — such as asking them to read every single page of the employee manual or requiring them to get set-up on Slack, email, Box, and all the other platforms all at once — will backfire. Three strategies can help organizations mitigate this overload and ensure employees have the space, time, and mental resources available to learn and thrive in their new job.
How to Improve Your Remote and Hybrid Team Leadership To improve your leadership of remote and hybrid teams, focus on the following skills many of which have synergistic benefits with respect to team success: fostering trust, building community and belonging, and establishing clear expectations.
https://trainingmag.com/leadership-development-has-never-been-more-challenging-or-more-important/
Change is everywhere. We work in a challenging and changing world. Generations are transitioning. Organizations are still struggling with where work should be done. Change management is never easy, but it has become tougher than ever.
Since this issue of Training is focused on HR and learning and development (L&D) trends for 2024, I surveyed a few leaders in the field to gather a diversity of perspectives.
When I asked Dr. Julia Phelan, co-founder of To Eleven, an innovative education consultancy firm, about her thoughts on training and development, she shared three:
1. “Give people time to learn. There is an increasing awareness that learning takes time. Learning is hard and accumulates gradually.
2. Establish, evaluate, and report learning outcomes. Training success usually is assessed only through approval ratings and positive feedback. Such ratings, however, do not truly gauge the impact of training. Measuring impact of the learning and development investment depends on the type of training and the stated goals.
3. Help people manage their careers in ways that align with their personal goals. People are different and everyone on your team may not be on the same path. Kim Scott (in “Radical Candor”) goes into detail about the importance of supporting all employees by helping them increase their impact with an organization—in line with their goals as well as the goals of the company.”
What Makes a Productive e-Learning Experience? 44 Educators Answer
During synchronous instruction/class time, ask questions of students, and require them to respond and submit an answer. This can be done anonymously, using a clicker system that works with Zoom and other online platforms, but pen and paperwork just as well. It can be helpful for students to be “required” to think, try and recall information, and respond to questions. This provides students an opportunity to confront their wrong answers or see that they are not alone in their misunderstanding (if other students made similar mistakes).
If instructors ask questions which are, to all intents and purposes rhetorical, i.e., students are not required to submit a response, students may not engage, think about the question, or try to generate an answer. Consequently, they will not benefit from being confronted with the fact that they didn’t know something. Without this practice, students often mistake recognition of information with mastery.
Knowing they may be required to answer questions can also lead to increased student engagement during class time.
(https://maestrovision.com/2020/10/20/what-makes-a-productive-e-learning-experience/#tip25)