11 Ways To Engage The Left Brain Learner In Your Courses

As course creators and trainers, we need to ensure that our learning content and delivery is cognitively engaging; and in particular to both sides of our learners brains.

In order to absorb our training, our left brain learners will subconsciously break down what we are teaching them into many parts, and our right brain learners will be pulling all of the parts together to create one whole.  

Without this becoming a lesson in neuroscience, course creators and educators can improve their training delivery by understanding this difference and that although learners are never wholly ‘left’ or ‘right’, they do tend to be more dominant in one side than the other; and therefore delivering to only one type will automatically exclude a large portion of your learner group.

Here are some considerations to make to be inclusive to left brain learners in your training design and delivery:

Understanding Left Brain Learners:

The way I like to remember who our left brain people are, is: “L” for logical.

Learners who are predominantly left-brained in nature are very similar to the ‘analytical’ information processing style of learning.

Here are 12 characteristics and suggestions for engaging the left brain learner in your online and offline training courses:
 

1. Left brain learners are logical and therefore like their training courses to be linear and sequential.  Make sure that you have a very clear curriculum that definitively shows every module lecture, learning outcome, and criteria that will be covered.
2. Left brain learners love step by step processes.  For every concept, skill, principle or theory that you are teaching, try to illustrate it with a step-by-step model.
3. Left brain learners love statistics, facts, evidence and proof.   The more numbers and back-up you can give to your training and every point you make, the more engaged and trusting left-brain learners will be of your training .
4. Left brain learners are often very comfortable with didactic lecture-based training; so feel free to use this method with your left brain learners.
5. Left brain learners love analytical exercises and activities.  For example, if you are teaching a section on industry terminology you could use crosswords or word searches.   If you are teaching any kind of concept or method,  you could get them to conduct a research project or analytical report that compares a number of viewpoints on the matter.
6. Left brain learners love detail, so ensure that you provide the opportunity for further reading and exploration on your subject as they are likely to want to investigate further.
7. Ensure that you reference all sources of information, facts, figures and statistics – the left brain learner is likely to question you if you don’t.
8. Ensure that your lectures and training follow a logical and progressive sequence.   If the left brain learner feels like the order jumps around they will become frustrated and disengaged with your training.
9. The left brain learner often prefers to work alone so that they can break down their learning in their own way.
10. Left brain learners like things to be tidy, clean and orderly – so make sure that your classroom is tidy if you deliver face-to-face training.  If your training is online, ensure that your lecture titles are clearly defined, well written void of spelling and grammatical errors; not only is this good practice but it will really irritate your left brain learners.
11. Left brain learners like simplicity.   Make sure that you have limited background noise and minimise all possible distractions in the training process.   If you are delivering training online,  avoid having overly distracting graphics, animations or any music in the background of your videos.

Although this is by no means an exhaustive list of methods for enhancing your online and offline training for the left-brain learner, it aims to provide you with a good starting point for engagement and inclusivity.

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