Training Tips #5 - Content Delivery

This Article is part of a series of Training Tips, intended to help experts without an education background design and teach courses.

#1 Where to Start

#2 Formal Assessment

#3 Finding the Right Level

#4 Creating Exercises

#5 Content Delivery

It was a windy, winter afternoon in The Netherlands and not only was the weather worse than it was in the morning, I was returning home with a completely different, scary job description.  “Understand me,” my boss Hans said, “your responsibility is not to just develop technology. Your responsibility is to facilitate other people to use your technology, or there is not value. Is that clear? And that means your job is *training*.” What? I didn’t sign up for training. I thought my job was about developing software and technology. I had only taught a few classes, and while it wasn’t so bad, I couldn’t see flying around the world doing it full time. I sort of panicked. 

Now, this could happen to you tomorrow. If it does, don’t panic. You can do it. And, it was a great career move. Teaching taught me self-confidence and a myriad of leadership skills. I can facilitate a room full of high-powered managers without breaking a sweat. I know how to fire up new conversations and end boring ones. Teaching taught me how to tell a story (fairly) well and how to herd groups in the direction I want them to go. Through my teaching job I identified talent and gave many performance evaluations.  By dealing with so many people per year, with so many different personalities, I learned leadership skills that would otherwise have taken decades longer. Teach, if you can get the chance!

If you have read the series of posts [Tips #1, #2, #3 and #4], you already have an idea how to design the course to the appropriate level, decided on formal assessments, and know how to create the best exercises. You need to create the rest of the course content in order to deliver the course. 

This brings up my final Tip: How do you deliver the course content? There are two fundamental options, in the classroom and virtually.

Classroom Delivery

The most obvious solution is to provide the class in the traditional venue, a classroom. This could be a conference room or a purpose-built classroom. Here are some tips:

Classroom delivery is about two main modes: lecture and exercises. In lecture, you would like all the students to face you. They will want to face you and not have to turn their heads very much for a long periods. They will want to take notes in front of them. You will want to be able to see and hear them easily and vice versa. You need a way to show slides and materials.  In exercises, you want the students to collaborate and have easy access to communicate with others, say teams of 5-6 people. They will likely have computers. You will want to have access to see what they are doing so you can coach them at the right moments.  Many of these criteria are in opposition. 

The ideal room has tables for students seated on two sides, or in such a way that they can sit facing in your direction during lecture and then move to work collaboratively. Ideally, you can move around the tables to provide coaching. Even more ideally, you can move amongst them during your lecture which will keep them slightly more engaged by reducing the separation between student and teacher. I also find it easier to hear students in noisy rooms if I can stand near them.

My recommendation is to not have too large a room. Your voice and theirs may be lost. The room must not be too noisy with fans and ventilation, a very common problem. 

The worst room type is a purpose-built computer-training room with workstations arranged in rows facing the front of the room. This is fine for ‘follow-the-leader’ training on software, which I detest because it is stupefying, but makes it very difficult to actually see the problems students are having and to help them one-to-one. And, there is no way to have group exercises.  A conference room is not perfect, but much better. Students can sit around the large conference table. Groups can be made and can work together, if a bit awkwardly. The instructor can roam around the group.

It is perhaps obvious, but a key challenge is providing IT for everyone in a conference room. Power should be supplied in the middle of the table so that cords are not causing safety problems everywhere in the space around the table.

Classroom delivery is especially good if the training is delivering some soft skills. When the topic is about interaction between humans, it helps to have the humans practice that interaction.

A good practice is to meet and greet each student on the way into the classroom.

A class should begin with introductions of the students and instructor.  Understanding their experience level is very helpful later on. Understanding their jobs and supervisors may also be important.

I always lay out the learning objectives near the start of the class, but I found that if I let them tell me their objectives first, it gives me a chance to show them I care about what they want to learn. Occasionally, they have a few topics that are important that I can add to the class. A few times they had objectives that were not compatible, and we worked out what would not be taught in class, but I could help them after class, or give them other learning sources.

I repeat the learning objectives at the end of the class.  As they say, “Tell ‘em what your’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.”

In a class longer than one day, I have a session at the start of the second day and all the days after, that asks 1) What was good about yesterday? 2) What could have been better? The first question gives them a chance to reflect and is a good warm-up to learning. We often go back over topics where there is confusion. The second question provides suggestions for the next time I give the class, but also I find out if there are problems with the room, the temperature, noise, etc.

Face-to-face delivery gives the instructor a way to provide a strong narrative. What is a narrative? Why is that important? Narrative is story telling. Story telling is the way our brains have been wired over the millennia to receive information. A good story is the most effective form of transfer of information, especially information that needs to contain an emotional component. If you are trying to persuade your audience, you need a good narrative. It is possible to do this with video, or writing, but it is harder than being together face-to-face in a classroom. So, if you have some small bits of information or instructions to pass along, for example how to use software, then you might not need a classroom delivery. If you are trying to persuade a challenging audience to change something fundamental in their long-standing behaviors, then you need to do it in a classroom.

Classroom delivery is likely preferred for small groups that are co-located and working on the same schedule. Short topics tend to work better in a classroom because there is less difference between the time cost for fast learners versus slow learners. 

In a classroom situation, the content is less important because the delivery can be adjusted or even created on-the-fly. Try using the Socratic method and just ask the students questions. Good questions lead to multiple answers and a debate of pros and cons, right and wrong. You can ask ‘Why?’ and get the students to consider the fundamentals. If you have never tried this, please do so. It shifts the effort from instructor to students, which may not be completely fair, but it certainly has a high effectiveness-to-effort ratio for the instructor. I saw my friend Mike Gunningham use this technique for the first time when he didn’t have time to prepare for an afternoon session, and it worked wonderfully. I now use it often, even when I have materials, to increase the energy level of the students.  The result is that I have the slides prepared, use this method, and then skip quickly through the slides to make sure our discussion has covered all the points before going onto the next session. 

While teaching in a classroom, if you ask the students a question and get no answer. Just be quiet. You don’t have to fill every silence. That time is for reflection and consideration. A long silence will get uncomfortable for you, but also for the students. This gives them a push to think and give you an answer. Reward their bravery when they finally answer, even if the answer is wrong.

Speaking of questions, you may fear that some of your students will know more than you do. The best approach is to be humble from the beginning and encourage people with experience to contribute. That increases student engagement and brings out additional correct information to the whole class. It also allows students that think they know something useful, but really have the wrong information, to get the correct information in your class. Occasionally, I get ‘helpful’ points that I can’t immediately correct, but seem wrong. I make a note and get back to the class after I have had a chance to explore that information. Sometimes, I’m wrong. I don’t have a problem admitting it because I have prefaced the whole class with my admission that I don’t know everything on the topic.

What to do if you must bring in an expert to the classroom? A few times this just didn’t work out well for the class. The expert had not prepared. The expert was not a very good teacher. The expert ran on far past the scheduled time slot. And other problems. I found a solution. I would solicit questions from the students before the expert arrives, then I would adjust the list of questions in a logical and useful order, and send the question list to the expert. Then, when the expert came to the classroom, we would give them a warm applause and seat them on a stool next to me in the front. I would then interview the expert in front of the students using those questions. I also allowed some fresh questions from the student audience during the interview. This was always an excellent session for the students, and required very limited preparation for the expert. 

Finally, an interesting group of students that is encouraged to contribute will very often get off-track. If it is useful, I let it continue. If it is not useful, I postpone the discussion for after the class or a different day. This is much better than just ending any off-track discussion abruptly.

Virtual Delivery

Virtual classes are a mixed bag. There are two methods. You can deliver a class synchronously (teacher and students at the same time) or asynchronously (not at the same time). I don’t find much to recommend a fully-synchronous mode. An asynchronous class can have all the materials supplied to the student on their schedule. That is a huge advantage.  Exercises can be adapted. These exercises can be more thoughtful, more thorough. They can be discussed with the instructor one-on-one or with other students. Groups can be assigned. Really there are few limits. The biggest benefit is tying the study to actual work. See the discussion about Workplace Assignments in Tip #2.

Still, I have mixed feelings about virtual classes. The advantage is huge for the student who cannot attend a class when they need it most. The dedicated, enthusiastic student who can work one-to-one with an instructor can get far more out of a virtual class than a classroom. I have helped some few students in this structured way, and it was more like an apprenticeship or intense coaching than a class. They came away highly skilled compared to my average classroom student.

However, the average student is not sufficiently committed. For the vast majority, the fact that the schedule was up to them meant that something was always more important than the class work. I set limits on the class duration and that did not seem to help. It was typical that the students got caught between their bosses who said ‘training can wait’ and my saying ‘hey, you need to work on this’. Of course, the bosses won. However, it never should have been a contest because the bosses paid for their staff to take the virtual course and signed off on all sorts of agreements about their staff commitments to the class. Some students did the course work at home on their own time. Most did not. Most did not finish. I think this is in line with published online course results.

I have contemplated two approaches to building more virtual classes. The first method is to prepare a high quality video with engaging content. I used this method a few times, creating videos for each session as well as equipping the videos with quizzes. The second method is to take my current classroom content and simply coach students through it, perhaps in multiple sessions of Q&A via video conferencing, more of a schedule of short synchronous sessions that can be started on the student’s schedule.  I have not used this approach yet.

Both methods involve a lot of work for the instructor, either up front or during the teaching. For larger numbers of students and shorter classes, the first method would be better. For a few students every once in a while, the second method would be better.  In either case, for a virtual course to be as effective as a classroom course, the instructor has to create a compelling narrative, be a guide through useful content, and provide engaging exercises.

I enjoyed writing these teaching Tips. If you have any suggestions for further topics, please let me know.

I will try to use these hashtags 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