An Educator’s Diary: Do You Love Me?

Last week was a busy week, after delivering Train the Trainer project. The participants thanked me, saying that understanding the correlation between Adult Learning theories and different best practices in learning interventions had been on their to do list but never gotten the solid way to doing it. The participants said that the workshop gave them the opportunity to implement some of the given techniques and enabled them to gain the required confidence to bring this experience & learning to real-life on the job implementation.

One of the participants asked me a totally unexpected question: “Do you love me?” Her question made me blush and I found myself speechless, and didn’t know what to say except asking her back: what do you mean? She noticed the surprising expression on my face and said,” I’m asking you this question because what you did in the training doesn’t only reflect how passionate you are about teaching but also your sincere persistence to make sure that me and everyone is fully aware and enlightened, besides totally absorbing, understanding and comprehending the topic. You must love me and love all of us to do that”.

Of course I was flattered. Who isn’t after this sweet feedback? Though, during the weekend, I thought a lot about this: what is special in my content design and delivery style? Is it that I design a learning intervention so participants/learners absorb the knowledge dose and are inspired to apply it at their workplace?

Therefore here I’m sharing my humble thoughts about learning interventions design and delivery and of course I’ll be more than happy to learn from yours :)

A successful learning intervention is not neither delivering complicated and heavy dose of knowledge nor an opportunity for the educators to show off how much they are expert in the topic. It’s more about infotainment approach where an educator role is to give participants/learners a comfortable environment where they can absorb the knowledge and apply it in the simplest way possible.  

If you are designing and delivering a learning intervention on a topic of your expertise, here are some things to think about to ensure that your participants have a transformative learning experience.

1.  Design for application:

• Review your basic Instructional Design Format.
• Identify what the learner needs to know in order to achieve the learning objective.
• Identify what the learner needs to be able to do to achieve the learning objective.
• Organize the learning content in logical steps.
•  Design ways for the learner to demonstrate what they are learning.

In addition to the above mentioned crucial steps, the educator shall have a comprehensive checklist of parameters that can help in predicting whether the participants will apply the training after the workshop or not. These are:

•  In case the learning intervention is designed for corporate, so more than one person from the company should participate therefore the ideas can be transferred to the whole company. So as to the participants should be encouraged to bring more than one person. Since this isn’t always possible, it is important to incorporate opportunities for them to capture their learning so they can share it. And it is recommended to target the right level of authority which means both the “doer” and the “decision maker.”
• Learning intervention curriculum should include sufficient time for participants to synthesize what they learned into some “reporting out and up” take away to apply at their workplace. In my learning intervention design, I always include a “learning object” such as a posters, Cards, Story cubes, puzzles and of course allocating time for participants to reflect.
• Workshop content has to be a sort of walk the talk. In other words, it has to be hands-on inputs and at the same time academically underpinned, this will be discussed in details in the next article, consequently, an action steps are considered the right theme for the learning intervention. That’s the reason why I developed the LEARN, COMPREHEND, CONNECT, and APPLY framework.

2.  Design for Different Levels of Capacity and Skills: Adapt in Real Time 

For the past 13 years that I’ve been teaching all forms of education:  (Academic lecturing, corporate training, executive coaching, and facilitation) it always fascinates me, no matter what, that I usually get a group of participants who are mixed levels of experience and capacity. So, I used to consider this fact in the learning design as it becomes the norm, at least for me. This usually takes a bit more effort but it always paid off. 

One more key for the learning intervention design lies in the correct and suitable structure of the exercises. So you need to be skilled at coaching some participants to adapt exercises so it meets their need. This means that you can’t be in the front of the room delivering content all the time.

For example, I incorporate some visual techniques for participants to use to do the exercises. Often this involves using materials such as sticky notes, poster sheets, and markers. By having the options available, participants can choose what works best for them so there are no barriers to learning. 

It is important to evolve your presentation style so it is more interactive, engaging, and a lean forward experience. There are many ways to do this, but try to avoid the Q/A at the end of the presentation, and facilitate discussions that are more reflective and the effect is far more reaching. It is recommended to encourage participants to reflect and share how they can apply the content and allow them to share both the potential and the existing challenges and opportunities.  

For example: I usually ask participants to do an active listening exercise with sticky notes where they were requested to jotting down notes in pink that they can implement, green that were opportunity, and blue that were a challenge. I facilitated a discussion using the sticky notes that ended up going much deeper than if I had just done a Q/A. Thus my piece of advice for every educator is that you need to welcome trying new techniques and different methodologies or you will end up doing the same old stuff which consequently will get you and your participants feeling bored.  

3.  Presenting content in a synergetic way that embrace participants different learning preferences and brain styles: 

While it takes some effort to apply different approaches to a one-time workshop. As an educator, you need to understand how the brain works to absorb information and apply it. The good news is that these approaches are simple, efficient, and easy to use. For example, incorporating short vides followed by an exercise where participants work on in order to apply the knowledge transferred. Another approach is to allow participants to present what they worked on. This provides participants to voice what they learned, reflect it in the workshop and propose their suggestions for applying it in their workplace. For me this is the whole actual product they can bring back to their workplace.

I also noticed participants using their mobile phones to capture some of the PPT graphs and designs . I asked a few why they were doing that — expecting a response about wanting to be able to share them in a PowerPoint back at the office. One participant told me that some colleagues from their company could participate and wanted to get feedback from other staff. Another participants mentioned that these simplified graphs gave them some ideas about potential suggestions and recommendation.

4.  Reflection on learning  

During the workshop, you as an educator need to slot in quiet time for participants to focus and combine what they learned into “theory into action” approach. Which summarize the takeaways to share with their team members and colleagues. I often use “ponder and compose” which is a few minutes of silence where participants can consolidate their ideas into action steps after the workshop. Their reflection can go deeper if this is followed by a formal closing to the workshop where participants state their action plan to implement their learning into their workplace. 

So far these are some of my humble reflections and I’m happy to share them with every professional works in learning and talent development for only one and only purpose of knowledge sharing.

 kindly accept my apology if “I “ consequently appears several times in the article.

What about you? If you are designing and delivering training, what are the methods you rely on? What do you do to not only transfer knowledge but to inspire participants and give them a valuable takeaways?

with sincere love,

Gihan Hussein