I have seen Nick talk several times about cueing which always has been impressive. I held off on making the commitment to this book for a while now. I guess it’s like seeing the movie first and hearing the book is even better. This leads to not wanting to make the commitment, due to knowing how it ends. This was a mistake because what you realize the book has a ton of substance behind the message and a great resource to refer back to over time. 

Nick has been talking about external cues for a long time now. He does an excellent job of presenting the research in an understandable and compelling way. Which makes you really think about how you are going to apply external cues in your setting. The other part was the learning through analogies and metaphors. As learners, we need to be taught based on existing understanding. If we do know something directly, we need something comparable to be more familiar with something that is new. The idea behind using a metaphor or analogy is to utilize that familiar topic to be more efficient in learning. 

For me though the big takeaway was Ericsson’s Deliberate Practice Model. This was powerful for me because I immediately thought of how it could apply in my setting. The rationale behind having different Goals (process vs outcome, Challenge (high vs low, Focus (implicit vs. explicit), and Feedback (task intrinsic vs augmented) to help deliver on our product more effectively sang loudly. In turn I went out and purchased the book for my entire staff and went in on how to apply this in our setting. 

We have gone through extensive training on this now. Which is kind of the point of reading in the first place. Finding useful tools to help us execute in our setting more effectively. I was familiar with the concepts in the book for the most part, but having something presented in a new way or a different format made all the difference. It inspired me to create a more concerted effort to evaluate our program and how we communicate what we are doing and what is the overall point. 

There is a lot of information out there on cueing, and it is largely to the credit of Nick and his presentation of this science. The substance is there, Nick does an excellent job of presenting the research along with the practical application of cueing. Along with seeing him speak this is an important book to have in your library.