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4MAT

Delivering Instruction That Everyone Can Understand

Why Use the Tool?

We're all familiar with times in our life when we really "connected" with instructors, making learning a real pleasure and making acquisition of new skills almost effortless. And we'll also remember times when we just weren't "on the same wavelength" as someone we had to learn from. Learning became a difficult, unpleasant, slow chore..

And at times when we may have trained others, perhaps in a formal training role or in passing knowledge on to our teams, we've probably found teaching some people easy, while others seem to have difficulty even with really simple things.

What's particularly frustrating is that the mismatches of style that cause many of these learning difficulties have long lasting effects, in terms both of personal outcomes and of team member and team performance.

4MAT is a different approach to instruction that seeks to overcome these differences in style, engage all learners, and present information in a format and using an approach which suits all.

If you are responsible for training and coaching team members or others (and most managers and professionals are, to some degree), then you need to know 4MAT and use it to a greater or lesser extent if you are to get the best from all of the people you are developing... (Sign in to read more.)

Full text of this article is available to members of the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club. If you're a member, please click here for full text, or sign in below.

Summary:

At the heart of 4MAT is a twelve stage process which you can use to structure a learning session to ensure that people with preferences for different learning styles can get the most from them. By using 4MAT, you can adopt an approach that will help all of your people learn effectively from you, not just those who happen to share your preferred approach to learning.

In the first three steps of the cycle, your task is to win the attention of your learners and engage their interest.

During steps four to six, you give them information they need, and help them build their own knowledge of the subject.

During steps seven to nine, you teach the skills the learners need, and encourage them to test and apply these theories.

And during steps ten to twelve, you encourage learners to creatively extend the use of skills and internalize the knowledge they've gained.

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