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As executive vice president of content, research, and professional services, Dr. Maggie Sass champions the company’s assessment data platform and EQ training programs, collaborating with sales to help translate research into practical, scalable solutions for clients. Dr Sass received her Ph.D. from the California School of Professional Psychology and a B.A. in psychology from University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining TalentSmartEQ, she spent 10 years at the Center for Creative Leadership in roles including senior faculty, global portfolio manager, and most recently, leadership solutions partner, as a facilitator, consultant, and designer of leadership development solutions. She also ran her own consulting firm for eight years, focused on organizational development, strategic planning, career development and executive coaching and facilitation. Dr. Sass is an adjunct professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, where she teaches graduate courses in organizational psychology. She also serves on a number of doctoral research committees and has written for the Consulting Psychology Journal and Talent Management Magazine; and contributed to the Handbook of Coaching Psychology and the Handbook of Coaching in Organizations. 

Maggie Sass

The latest insights from TalentSmartEQ’s 2025 State of EQ report sheds light on a critical workplace shift: a move toward a people-first approach. 

The EQ Advantage: How Emotional Intelligence Is Key to Workplace Success

Maggie Layfield Education Session at ATD25.

C Is for Cookie: The Recipe for Successful L&D Programs

Maggie Romanovich is a passionate talent development advocate and advisor, dedicated to fostering a culture of continuous learning and championing ongoing professional development. She is committed to delivering holistic, best-in-class learning solutions that align business strategy and needs with professional development. She leads L&D efforts for national sales at Constellation Brands, the company behind the beer, wine, and spirits brands that people have celebrated with for over 70 years. Romanovich enables and empowers account managers through curriculum development, blended learning opportunities, and sales enablement.An accidental trainer, she has been practicing talent development at Constellation for six years. She graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in communications and radio. She earned her APTD certification in 2017 as well as her Master Instructional Design certificate.

Maggie Romanovich, APTD

Maggie Layfield is a former educator who has spent the last 10 years in the corporate sales sector. She serves as the leader of the Sales team at NetSupport, developing onboarding and training content and delivering training both internally and externally. She has spoken at the Training Industry Conference, ISTE, and IAITAM. She is passionate about creating more engaging, interactive learning environments for employees. She is an avid baker and mother of three. 

Maggie Layfield

Maggie Cox is a sales enablement lead at Hobsons, an education technology company. With a passion for people development, leader development, and innovative transformation of sales organizations, she empowers customer-facing teams with strategic training to effectively meet the needs of clients. In this role, Maggie partners with key leaders across the business to define, design, and execute priorities that will accelerate business growth and impact.

Maggie Cox 

Part 1 of a blog series by Vincent Miholic examines what the research says about learning styles.

Is Appealing to Learning Styles Malpractice?

In January, OpenAI’s conversational platform, ChatGPT-3, became the fastest-growing app in internet history. This is just one indication of growing curiosity about GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) and other chatbots in the past few weeks. As one of the first learning professionals to see the potential of conversational AI and one of the few designing the applications for years, I’m excited to see the recent attention paid to this engaging technology.In my book, AI in Talent Development, I outline several ways chatbots can be used as part of a robust learning experience, and ChatGPT-3, the third version in OpenAI’s ChatGPT series, demonstrates most of them. When ATD asked me to write a post on this subject, I struggled to find the value I could add to the exploding conversation. I decided to do what people say I do best: Give you the bottom line and point the way towards practical applications. Let’s start with the basics.How ChatGPT-3 WorksChatGPT operates on an autoregressive model. It’s not as complicated as it may sound. A transformer is a program, model, or algorithm that converts code into something else—in this case, human language. The autoregressive part means the software uses prior events to predict the most likely future events, which is what your brain does all the time. It allows ChatGPT and similar applications to simulate a conversation between two humans. Learn the two keys to making an application like this work:1. Natural Language ProgrammingNatural Language Processing (NLP) allows the bot to recognize input through human speech or writing, eliminating the need for menus or code to engage with it. This same ability enables the bot to reply through text. Before the development of NLP, most chatbots were menu-driven, and the bot responded by selecting the best fit from a database of pre-written options. Conversational AI represents a new way for humans to use computers; it’s a user interface requiring less hardware and prior knowledge than any previous UIs.!CAUTION! Don’t confuse Natural Language Processing with the pseudo-science term using the same acronym. Neural Linguistic Programming is widely disproved and an invalid practice.2. Massive Training DatasetsLike any neural network (including your own), AI models must be effectively trained using a technique called deep learning. Quite frankly, the stunning capabilities of ChatGPT-3 are nothing new. As David Chalmers points out, there is no new technology here. There are many bots with similar abilities, and I described them in detail in 2020. How this bot is trained and how well this approach works is innovative. First, Open AI used the largest training dataset, combining a database containing much of the internet, a huge library of books, and Wikipedia.Then, after refining the bot in-house, Open AI released it free to the world. As we all started to play with it, we were training it further for them. Think of it as a crowd-sourced training effort. The sheer size of the training database resulted in what everyone always expected: Impressive results that can mimic human expression so well it is hard to tell a machine generated it. However, there continues to be an underlying problem: Chatbots are only as good as their training (like us humans). If you consider the source of GPT’s training, you can see why it sometimes makes mistakes.What Can We Do With ChatGPT-3?Because this product is still being explored, there may be new use cases by the time this post publishes. Below are a few applications that can save time and make your work as a learning professional more efficient and productive.Write ContentIf you ask the bot to write a paragraph introducing a subject, it comes back almost instantly with plausible, grammatically correct text. Because its training included unvalidated sources like the internet and Wikipedia, some of the content it produces must be corrected. Still, you can get excellent first drafts and refine your content from there.Summarize DocumentsLooking for a “Reader’s Digest” version of a book or article? Paste the text into a prompt to ChatGPT, and it returns a nice summary that should hit most of the highlights.Write and Troubleshoot Computer CodeBecause ChatGPT was built to analyze and produce output in human language, it is also great at computer languages. Programmers are using it to troubleshoot code. It can even generate new code if you ask it to develop a new capability.Translate DocumentsFar more effective than other translators out there, ChatGPT can take a website or article and translate it into another language.Write and Grade QuizzesYou can feed your content into GPT and ask it to generate a quiz with answers. Or, give it a general subject, like world history, and it will do the same. Feed your student’s quiz responses into GPT, and it will grade them (even essays!).Create GamesI asked GPT to create a game teaching sixth-grade students about the solar system, and the bot came back with a fun adventure through space.Improve Your WritingI didn’t do this for this article, but I could have asked GPT to review my draft and suggest improvements.Conduct ResearchI asked the bot to provide a list of current peer-reviewed studies on chatbot use in education using APA style and received a properly formatted list.Why Does ChatGPT Have Some People Worried?While most of the comments about GPT are positive, you will find a few educators deeply concerned about this new tool’s capabilities.Mimicking Human WritingTeachers are worried about GPT’s ability to write plausible text reading like a human created it and write in a known author’s style. A student could ask the bot to write a paper in the same style as one of their previous works, and it would be hard to tell the GPT paper wasn’t an original student effort. But, again, this mimicking ability is nothing new. AI has generated art in the style of great artists for years. ChatGPT applies the same predictive approach to language.ChatGPT Makes MistakesAnother concern is the bot’s ability to present false information so convincingly that some users forget to validate the response with research. For example, I asked the bot to calculate the mean of five numbers, and the result was interesting. I received a detailed explanation of the statistical definition of “mean” and how to calculate it, which I did NOT request. However, the bot added the five numbers incorrectly.To be fair, ChatGPT wasn’t built to perform math problems. But it didn’t tell me that or report the result might be incorrect. Like any willing assistant, it did its best to provide an answer. If I had been a student relying on GPT’s help, I would have been wrong. The reason for most of these mistakes is the same reason that it is such a stunning improvement in the chatbot experience: It’s primary sources of information are the internet and Wikipedia.I asked Vince Han, one of the pioneers in building chatbots for learning, to sum up the challenges presented by GPT’s new capabilities, and here’s his response:“One of the effects of ChatGPT & increased quality in Artificial Intelligence in general is shifting the skills users need. For example, most users have developed a skill for how to search which is knowing how to craft keywords and how to sift through search results. Now, people will need the skill of discernment, or learning how to decipher truth and views from a chatbot that provides what reads like a definitive answer. So, from a performance support perspective, yes, one can now get an immediate response to a question but how accurate and relevant that response is will be up to them to determine. “As educators, we must now confront a problem that has been boiling for decades—the decline in critical thinking across most domains, demographics, and workgroups. In my opinion, ChatGPT makes this gap more visible and increases the urgency for closing it quickly.Closing ThoughtsBecause Microsoft owns the license for the exclusive use of the model, we’ve all been working for them, revealing exciting use cases that may find their way into AI-enabled Microsoft products. For now, the platform consists of both free and professional versions. It’s an excellent way to begin learning about the promise of AI and our place alongside it. As machine learning expert Santiago Pino says, “AI will not replace you. A person using AI will.”Where Can You Learn More?There are so many articles about this subject right now that I’ve limited myself to a few favorites:Under the Hood of Chat GPT With Myra RoldanHow ChatGPT3 Impacts the Future of L&D in an AI WorldChatGPT Has Educators Scrambling to Keep UpWhat Is ChatGPT and How to Teach With ItWhat Is ChatGPT and Why Does It Matter?What Is ChatGPT? Is It the Beginning of the End?Ger’s Learning Notes #51 - ChatGPTFor more information and resources, Check out ATD's AI Resource page.

ChatGPT-3 Has Everyone Talking

During a recent ATD online course, Essentials of Brain-Based Learning, the instructor, Margie Meacham, shared ideas for brain-aware activities that support engagement, retention, and application. The large group divided into small breakouts to delve further into how these activities, such as flash cards, graphic organizers, and videos, are actually used in their respective organizations. Back in the large group discussion for sharing excellent practices, one participant mentioned a technique that had not been discussed: concept posters. Concept posters are a staple for ATD Forum labs and sessions at the ATD International Conference and Exposition. Generally, they are customized and adapted for both the theme and the approach. They were also used during the 2014 ATD Forum Fall Lab at Cochlear in Centennial, Colorado, where the theme was The Suite Spot: Developing Agile and Innovative Leadership. Sample concept posters are provided based on this session. The purpose of a concept poster, a human-centered design method, is to concisely and visually convey the essence of a concept, idea, or point of view for the purpose of gaining support for implementation. It can serve as part of a business case to move an organization from the current state to a future state because it is a visual pitch story. The tool graphically conveys a compelling point of view; thereby, promoting a shared vision within a group. Additionally, concept posters help groups obtain buy-in from decision makers and provide a roadmap for moving forward. Developing Concept Posters Because the brain processes images faster than words, you can convey ideas much more succinctly in this graphical manner. The active physical engagement (doing) of the participants also contributes to neural connections. When facilitating the development of a concept poster, set the context by demonstrating how the concept poster can distill of a lot of information into its core essence by using a compelling graphic and a few words. The primary rules for a concept poster include being self-explanatory and visual. Using a blank large sheet of paper, the facilitator can sketch a quick outline of where elements might appear on the poster or show an example. Some of the components might include the following: title for initiativetagline for initiativeprimary stakeholderskey featuresprimary goalstimeline for implementationbenefits of the initiativesketch or diagram the idea. Easel size paper is ideal for sharing and communicating with others. While a concept poster can be either an individual or small group activity, it can be completed in 15-30 minutes. Once completed, feedback on how others understood and received the message is extremely valuable. In some Forum labs we have added a formal process for reviewing and feedback. Having other participants use questions to get further clarity can be meaningful and helpful. For this feedback process we place the posters on the wall and let another group use a “check list” and discussion to assess the poster for clarity and meaning. Here are some resources to assist with developing a concept poster. Like all new activities, sometimes it is more effect to “just do it” and not introduce it as a “concept poster method for the human-centered design toolkit.”Resources Innovating for People: Handbook of Human-Centered Design Methods. LUMA, 2012. “Concept Poster Session” by Gamestorming Blog.“Inside the Learning Brain” by Nick Van Dam. T+D, April 2013. “Tool: Business Design Concept Poster” by Noise Between Stations Blog. “Speed of Processing in the Human Visual System” by S. Thorpe, D. Fize, and C. Marlot. Nature, 1996, Volume 381. Effectiveness of Visual Language, Wharton School of Business Infographic.

Concept Posters: Incorporating Brain-Aware Methods into the Curriculum

Margie Meacham, “The Brain Lady,” is a scholar-practitioner in the field of education and learning and president of LearningToGo. She specializes in practical applications for neuroscience to enhance learning and performance. Meacham’s clients include businesses, schools, and universities. She writes a popular blog for the Association of Talent Development and has published two books, Brain Matters: How to Help Anyone Learn Anything Using Neuroscience and The Genius Button: Using Neuroscience to Bring Out Your Inner Genius.She first became interested in the brain when she went with undiagnosed dyslexia as a child. Although she struggled in the early grades, she eventually taught herself how to overcome the challenge of a slight learning disability and became her high school valedictorian, graduated magna cum laude from Centenary University, and earned her master’s degree in education from Capella University with a 4.0.Meacham started her professional career in high-tech sales, and when she was promoted to director of training, she discovered her passion for teaching and helping people learn. She became one of the first corporate trainers to use video conferencing and e-learning and started her own consulting company from there. Today she consults for many organizations, helping them design learning experiences that will form new neural connections and marry neuroscience theory with practice.“I believe we are on the verge of so many wonderful discoveries about how we learn. Understanding what happens in the brain is making us better leaders, teachers, parents, and employees. We have no limits to what we can accomplish with our wonderful brains— the best survival machines ever built.”—Margie Meacham

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