Theatre Based Learning: Another way to deliver Corporate Training

Over the past three to five years, theatre-based corporate training has progressed from role plays, ice-breakers and team-building activities into a serious tool. Organizations are using it for everything from behavioural adaptation, change management and leadership skills development to handling professional, cultural and personal issues. The objective of such training is giving an experience to a learner to evaluate different life of events and choices that may impact their work, professional attitude and performances.

Theatre based learning is about learning through experience. It is neither a ‘role play’ nor a way of teaching ‘acting techniques’. It helps students or learners to identify, challenge and eventually change a certain set of unnecessary behaviours in the workplace. It helps to awaken the learner to see things from a different perspective. Learners are reinvigorated to explore alternative methods. Rather than acting themselves, they need to unswerving the actors to modify their behaviours to influence the ultimate outcomes of a scenario or situation. It makes upper management work easy to have a look at those critical or challenging issues of their workforce in a very precautionary environment where it's all right to get it wrong sometimes.

Teaching or working in this way always allows learners, employees or participants to act the entire scenario and platform to discuss or restart again and again to identify effective solutions or methods to contribute positively in the business. We have also seen a lot of other unconventional and effective training modes are:

• Applied Theatre
• Scenario Act
• Story Telling: This encourages leadership through stories
• Gamification, Tech-Games, Field Games, Group Cooking
• Art/ Poetry
• Dancing Act: Body movement
• Film/ Video Logs
• Peer or Collaborative Therapy

All the above modes build motivation, accelerate learning and confidence aiding personal development. Application of theatre mode in the corporate learning and development of the employee, scripted situation-based scenarios are written to highpoint the significant areas that need improvement. Acting development techniques and traditional training methods combined with these scenarios, help to endorse the state’s issues and stimulate debate around the obvious questions and queries. Ultimately it helps them to reach a positive and motivational solution. 

Let's see how these go in the upcoming years, It will always be a question that how we can replace it with any other mode of delivery of blend it with any of them to get the better results.