Training Tips #3 - Finding the Right Level
This Article is part of a series of Training Tips, intended to help experts without an education background design and teach courses.
This is the third in a series of tips for experts who also train as part of their work. I am aiming to avoid the jargon* used by the educational industry where it is not helpful to the technical expert as trainer.
In Tip #1, I showed you to start by thinking about assessment and use that to start breaking up the topic into learning objectives. I also explained the overall course design and construction steps as
Topic --> Assessment --> Learning Objectives --> Exercises --> Course Content
In Tip #2, I ranked several ways to assess students formally and whether or not to do so in practice.
In Tip #3, I will explain how to simplify your decisions about the right target level and then creating the learning objectives prior to creating exercises and course content.
Pitching the class at the right skill level is important for successful training. Too low and your bored class will be considering how much time they are wasting. Too high and you will leave many students behind, and you may not be able to finish the planned material on time. If I have to err in one direction or another, I would aim high because those problems are more easily solved on the fly during the class.
It is helpful to be able to think about and describe the levels of learning. If you previously followed the link here, you discovered Bloom’s Taxonomy with its six levels of ‘observable actions’ to demonstrate learning. However, six levels is overkill. If you try to apply the six levels, you waste time deciding which level is appropriate. You don’t need more than three. I am adding one that Bloom lacks--the bottom level--lumping the other ones into three levels that have sufficient distinction. So here are four simple skill levels that are, I hope, easy to distinguish and describe:
Untaught
If you are assessing people, you need to have an ‘Untaught’ category. At this level, they would have common knowledge, but nothing (or not much) more. I mention this level because we created a whole system at a company where I worked and forgot until very late that there were people without even a measurable level of knowledge in certain areas and we had no category to capture such an assessment!
Novice
Someone at this level, Novice, knows enough to have a conversation with an expert, asking intelligent questions about an area of knowledge. They may be able to help with a task, but not complete it without supervision. ‘Can do with substantial help’ falls into this category.
Skilled
Someone at this level, Skilled, can correctly create work products in this knowledge area without supervision. They can reliably follow existing processes and make small adaptations. They use an example work product and existing techniques.
Mastery
Someone at this level, Mastery, can create new work products/tools/techniques/procedures in this knowledge area, judge the quality of work, as well as organize and manage knowledge.
But, I can make this even simpler for you. Obviously, you will not be building a course at the Untaught level. You almost certainly will not be building a single classroom course at the Mastery level. Mastery would always require a series of courses and something like a thesis program, or an apprenticeship program. Is it fair to say most Masters have made themselves? I think so.
That leaves only Novice and Skilled. But, you should not create a course at the Novice level either. There are five reasons to build at the Skill level only:
Degradation - It is always better to teach at a slightly more intense level. Knowledge and skills degrade over time. Perhaps the student only needs to learn at the Novice level. If you teach at the Skilled level, their retained knowledge will degrade to Novice level. For those students, they will retain the sufficient level longer.
Marketing - It is definitely better to be able to say what a student will be able to ‘Do’ than what they will ‘Know’.
Adaptability - You can very easily move content and exercises down to a Novice level at the last minute if you find the class requires it (for example they are missing necessary prerequisite materials, or the class must be shortened too much). Moving up to the Skill level from Novice is much more difficult. For example, if I create the course content for a Skill level, and find out that I have aimed a bit to high (e.g. people are struggling to understand), I can spend time on the basics, spend more time coaching, drop out some of the more advanced exercises (I can still provide them as reading material) and I’m still going to be successful. In fact, adapting this way is my normal mode. In a way I’m still teaching at the Skill level, just perhaps a narrower skillset. The most important thing is that the skills you and I do teach should be taught thoroughly.
Reusability - You do not want to create two courses for two levels when one can be adapted as described above.
Fun - If you teach only information, that can be boring. If you teach people to accomplish even a very narrow skill, that can be much more interesting. For example, perhaps I’m teaching a completely Untaught person about cooking, and it is too much (too long, too hard) to try to teach them to cook a full meal in one event. It would be much more fun for them to learn to complete a small skill such as measuring or chopping ingredients, perhaps even with help and supervision, than it would for them to learn a broader, but shallower knowledge set, such as being able to explain the recipe steps.
If you agree with me so far, then referring to the Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs, generally I create learning objectives that start with the verbs in the middle of the page. For example, ‘Complete a functional gas lift design starting from a set of data’. Or, ‘Use the supplied software to find the minimum critical rate given a set of data’. Or, ‘Apply good negotiation practices in a deal-making meeting.’ It is fine to use other action verbs in your learning objectives, but choose observable ones that would easily survive external scrutiny. ‘Build’ is a great verb for a learning objective--you can see if someone has built something. Don’t use ‘Comprehend’, ‘Understand’, ‘Absorb’, ‘Internalize’, or other verbs that refer to brain processes not easily audited. The more unequivocal you can make the learning objectives, the easier you will find it to start creating the right exercises.
Summary: Take the topic you have been asked to teach and break it into useful, observable skills that students will be able to do. Those will become your learning objectives. Build your exercises around those skills.
I will start writing about Exercises next, unless I get some other suggestions.
Speaking of which, if you have suggestions for any future topics, I would love you get them. Thanks!
I will try to use these hash tags for this series of articles: #trainingtips #training #learning #engineers
Burney is an almost-completely retired global consultant engineer, and Director of Retirement Testing at the Waring Retirement Laboratory