Home » BRAIN SCIENCE » 4Cs of Brain-Based Learning

4Cs of Brain-Based Learning

I had the pleasure of co-facilitating a session with Angela Agresto, introducing her new tool, Brain Building Blue Prints to our Trainers Warehouse community. The tool, based on Sharon Bowman’s 4C-framework for designing and delivering training, maps perfectly to brain-based learning. By pairing brain-science with the four Cs of training design and delivery — Connections, Content, Concrete Practice, and Conclusions — facilitators have immense power to affect genuine learning and retention.

WHERE MEMORY HAPPENS

What’s most exciting about the framework is that it maps so perfectly to how our brains and memory work.  You see, the truth is that we forget most of what we experience, like that 6-digit authorization code you got an hour ago. Brain scientists Elizabeth Kensinger and Andrew Budson, authors of The Science of Memory: Why We Forget and How to Remember Better,  explain that our brains likely evolved as they did so we don’t drown in minutiae and can focus on new information that will keep us alive and safe.

Instead of remembering everything that crosses our mind, we remember just what we take time to think about, process, encode, store, and retrieve.

“Memory is the residue of thought.”

~ Daniel Willingham

Training that’s both designed and delivered with this in mind will be most memorable. The challenge for any trainer or presenter is to help their audience focus on information long enough for it to be held in the hippocampus (short-term memory storage) and engage with it enough that it moves to the cortex (long-term storage), which happens while we sleep. This must be done at each of the four stages of learning:

• C1 – Connections – creating mental links to current pertinent knowledge
• C2 – Content – learning and experiencing new material
• C3 – Concrete Practice – practicing new skills and putting new information to use
• C4 – Conclusions – reinforcing, recalling, remembering, and planning next steps

HOW MEMORIES ARE ENCODED

Sometimes experiences stick with us because they effected us profoundly and we spend a lot of time thinking about it before, during, or after the fact. For all the other stuff we experience day-in and day-out, we need to mentally tag it, for it to stick in our minds. Tagging or “encoding” information is an active process requiring F.O.U.R. actions. We must:

• Focus – Put time and effort into holding the memory.
• Organize – Chunk material into related groups (because most remember 4-7 things at once).
• Understand – Make sense of difficult material or experiences.
• Relate, Recall/Retrieve, Repeat* – Tie learning to something we already know.

These FOUR work together and reinforce one another. For instance, organizing helps with understanding and takes focus. Through understanding, we relate new information to prior knowledge, and so on.

Next, as we pair this F.O.U.R. with the 4Cs (4 x 4), we see that:

• Connections help learners relate new material to something they already know
• Content. learning new material requires focus, organization of principles, and repetition
• Concrete Practice and putting new learning to use reflect deeper understanding, and focus
• Conclusions, or planning next steps, similarly necessitates repetition, recall, reinforcement, understanding, and relations

Brain Building Blueprints Kit BUY NOW

6 BRAIN PRINCIPLES TO INCREASE FOCUS!

Through each stage of the 4Cs framework – Connection, Concepts, Concrete Practice, and Conclusions – a facilitator’s goal is to help learners engage with new materials in ways that require focus. The more focus, the more areas of the brain that are engaged, the better. Bowman’s 6 brain principles can guide us toward approaches that increase the likelihood of successful encoding. Here’s why…

1. Movement beats sitting – both because it involves multiple areas of the brain and helps move oxygen to the brain, giving it fuel.
2. Writing beats reading –  it requires movement, tactile input, focus, organizing notes, and occupies multiple areas of the brain.
3. Talking beats listening – listening is passive, but talking requires focus.
4. Images beat words – for several reasons: humans think in pictures, images evoke emotion, and images are colorful and creative. Images also help us chunk multiple thoughts into a single concept.
5. Shorter beats longer – the hippocampus has limited capacity. Breaks give learners time to organize, relate, and re-focus on what’s important and worthy of memory.
6. Different beats same – we notice what’s new and stop paying attention to things to which we’ve we’ve grown accustomed, like the new curtains we hung years ago and couldn’t take our eyes off of are now invisible to us.

“4 by F.O.U.R.” EXERCISES & ACTIVITIES

Brain-friendly learning exercises for each of the 4Cs might include the following, which involve a rich combination of movement, writing, talking, images, and brevity:

C1 – Connections

The first step calls on trainers to help learners connect with new content and other learners. They can do this by:

1. Mingle & Mention – find a partner and explain why you’re taking the class
2. Share 3 – explain to another participant 3 things you already know about the topic
3. Sort & Match – with a partner, organize new principles by moving them into place
4. Dot Voting on Outcomes – place a dot by the learning outcome you hope to achieve
5. Find a photo – choose a picture from an image deck that reflects your feelings about the topic

C2 – Content

Delivering new content, the primary goal of learning, calls on trainers to expose learners to new material in ways that will engage their full brain and focus. They might facilitate the encoding of new material by having learners:

1. Map a journey or order next steps – create a timeline or road map
2. Illustrate a concept – pull out the art supplies and get creative
3. Create a mind map – illustrate how different concepts fit together
4. Create a cheat sheet – organize concepts and highlight key points
5. Compare multiple approaches – discuss options in small groups
6. Amplify/Reduce – what would happen if new concepts were moved to extremes
7. Critics Corner – stand, walk to a corner, say what could go wrong if…

C3 – Concrete Practice

When practicing new skills or putting new information to use, learners can make the material their own through exercises like these:

1. Fill in the blanks – complete old-school-style worksheets
2. “Gallery Walk” through pictures, collages, or image boards – have students explore the projects or synopses that other groups have put together on a topic
3. Stage  a debate – 
4. Role plays different situations – set up practice sessions to try different approaches in a safe environment
5. Teach back – have students teach back a segment to one another or a colleague

C4 – Conclusions

Finally, the practice of recalling, remembering, and planning next steps helps reinforce newly learning information. For instance, learners might engage in one of these activities that would require focus, understanding, and the use of their new knowledge:

1. Prepare and share a presentation
2. Stage  a debate
3. Postcard to yourself
4. Post a poem
5. Paper Airplane Reminders

BRIAN-SCIENCE 4×4 CONCLUSIONS

When we align our training with how the brain naturally learns, we unlock the true potential for lasting memory, skill development, and behavior change. The Brain Building Blueprints kit, rooted in the 4Cs model and backed by solid neuroscience, offers facilitators a powerful roadmap to create more engaging, impactful, and memorable learning experiences. By intentionally designing opportunities for connection, focused content delivery, hands-on practice, and meaningful conclusions — and by weaving in strategies that maximize focus through movement, dialogue, imagery, and variety — we not only teach better, we honor the way our brains are built to thrive.

Ultimately, training that is brain-friendly leaves learners not just informed, but also able to remember, apply, and grow.

*  NOTE: Kensinger and Budson expound on the importance of repetition and retrieval in the memory cycle, but don’t include it in their description of the F.O.U.R. strategies to start the encoding process.

READ MORE

Brain Bites – a synopsis of Kensinger and Budson’s, The Science of Memory: Why We Forget and How to Remember Better

Brain Science in Training – more on Sharon Bowman’s 6 Principles, including activities to put these into action.

• 
• Comments
• 
  Share