The Insides and Outsides of Games

- Managing the Invisible

How can games help you achieve what you want to in life and what are the necessary components for their outcome to be a success?

Games help children understand the world around them by reducing its complexity, they let teachers make information unforgettable by giving it emotional meaning and they enable managers to empower those around them by allowing them a glimpse of who they really are what their real potential is.

The successful outcome of a game - or of any other communicative situation - depends, to a large extent, on "invisible components". This workshop will focus specifically on these and on the behind the scenes management that these require. It will study what is needed for an organisation to provide a learning environment where success is built into the curriculum itself.

We will explore, and acquire skill in, using games, music, role play, and humour to correspond to the real structure of human memory and mental activity. We will examine the nuts and bolts of successful human management. We will look at forms of communication that appeal to all learning styles. We will enlarge our appreciation of the determining role played by positive and negative suggestion in success and failure.

After each activity, we shall probe the invisible components that ensured success: lead-ins to the activities, the basic structure of the activities, themselves, the nature of instructions given, the speed and rhythm of activities, the personalization of information and use of memory hooks to facilitate retention, the "sticking power" of anecdotes and jokes, transitions from one activity to another, peripheral posters, music, non-verbal and double-plane communication, indirect correction techniques, and ways of co-opting resistance.

More specifically, participants will learn how to:

• lead into activities such that there is total commitment and excitement from the outset
• give instructions that are models of conciseness
• use activities as "distractions" so that key information can be presented peripherally thereby gaining easier access to long-term memory
• create variation in type, rhythm and speed of activities so that these correspond to normal cycles of mental alertness
• use story telling, anecdotes and jokes to set in place chains of association that develop and improve memory
• end activities such that the energy from them is immediately recycled into the next one
• design posters that teach through indirect perception
• use different kinds of music to encode information with emotional colour and bring about heightened awareness
• be more effective in communicating non-verbally and be able to read non-verbal cues in others accurately
• use indirect correction techniques that "learners" never see but which work immediately

This course will be a succession of quick-moving games and other communicative activities that transform rather than teach. It will draw upon music and other arts, thereby modelling the Suggestopedic approach. Its objective is the transfer, to participants, of skills necessary for "brain-compatible" learning and change to come about. Its "hidden agenda" is to infuse educators with a specific vision and attitude that nurtures growth and discovery.