Pedagogy

Pitch learners up, not down

Most training aims low on purpose. We assume people must nail the basics before they can think — so we keep them at "remember and understand", then wonder why they switch off. The science says we've got it backwards.

Curiosity doesn’t come from memorising. It comes from the harder, more interesting work — pulling ideas apart, weighing them up, making something new. A course that only asks people to remember isn’t playing it safe. It’s cutting out the very thing that would grab them.

In twenty years watching teams build training, the courses that worked did the surprising thing: they gave people a real problem early — before they felt “ready” — so the basic facts stuck to something that mattered.

The measure is what the learner can do, not what they were shown.

What “pitching up” looks like in practice

Show the real example before the theory. Ask people to make a call before you teach the rule. Let them be wrong for a moment — then give them the answer. It sticks, because it lands as the answer to a question they were already asking.

None of this is soft. It’s harder to build and harder to sit through. But that’s the point — the effort is the learning. If it feels easy, check whether anything is really changing.