I'm not sure if anyyone else feels this way but I've found, after attending many professional conferences, that the last day is usually made up of sessions that I just don't feel much connection to. Do organizers know that many attendees leave early or aren't as engaged on the final day? Do presenters know the audience would rather be at the bar or getting ready for their flight home (or at the pool is you're in sunny Orlando like me!)than attending sessions through the afternoon on the last day?
For whatever reason I didn't feel that spark today like I did the previous days, and I didn't find any sessions that spoke out to me. While I'm so happy that I'm going home with tangible plans for enhancing my work output I wish I'd have been able to carry that through the fourth day. Maybe that's the issue right there... ASTD made the decision, who knows how long ago, to spread their conference out over 4 days - with huge blocks of time throughout each day without any learning sessions going on. Every other conference I've been to has had at least 4 sessions per day. Perhaps the feedback they got was that 4 sessions was overload and their solution was to space out the learning by adding an additional day. Well, now that this experiment has run its course for a few years (I had the same reaction after lat year's conference) I'd highly recommend cutting out one day, getting rid of hours and hours of wasted time each day, and keep us charged by offering heavy hitting sessions through the end of the conference. We pay too much, and invest too much time, for there not to be critical learning offered all the way through to the end.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Evaluation and relationships - working together by sharing the right message
I'm seeing a trend in my choices of which sessions to attend at ICE this year. Apparently it's all about evaluation for me. I think I've seen everything the Kirkpatricks have had to say so far, I spent this morning learning more about the do's and don'ts of Level 1's, and now I'm sitting in the front row waiting to hear part 2 of Jim and Patti Kirkpatrick's presentation on the new world of their 4 Levels - ROE - Return on Expectations. I'm finding the further I move into my organization managing expectations, or helping others identify or realize their own expectations of me and my work, is more and more critical.
Along those lines, I attended a session yesterday with Rob VeVerka where we focused on building relationships with senior leaders and how important it is to craft messages, and expectations, to match their business needs rather than expecting them to know or care how we think and operate. That's an important message for me because in my former life everyone I spoke to came from the same place - all education all the time. We all shared the same language, we all came up through the same ranks and had similar experiences we could all share. It made relating to even senior leaders so much easier. But now, as I try to plug my education and learning background into a business environment I find it so much more difficult to communicate, to get them to care about what I care about.
So I attend these sessions learning how to craft my message, and gather the right kinds of data by asking the right kinds of questions so I can share the right kids of information with the right kinds of leaders. It all makes sense now that I see the connections. I don't think I'd have been able to make that connection, as quickly at least, without attending this conference. I love it when I can point to THAT thing that makes the expenditure of time and money seem so worthwhile.
Along those lines, I attended a session yesterday with Rob VeVerka where we focused on building relationships with senior leaders and how important it is to craft messages, and expectations, to match their business needs rather than expecting them to know or care how we think and operate. That's an important message for me because in my former life everyone I spoke to came from the same place - all education all the time. We all shared the same language, we all came up through the same ranks and had similar experiences we could all share. It made relating to even senior leaders so much easier. But now, as I try to plug my education and learning background into a business environment I find it so much more difficult to communicate, to get them to care about what I care about.
So I attend these sessions learning how to craft my message, and gather the right kinds of data by asking the right kinds of questions so I can share the right kids of information with the right kinds of leaders. It all makes sense now that I see the connections. I don't think I'd have been able to make that connection, as quickly at least, without attending this conference. I love it when I can point to THAT thing that makes the expenditure of time and money seem so worthwhile.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Hearing Kirkpatrick for the last time
Sunday, May 22, 2011
ASTD 2011 International Conference & Exposition - getting warmed up
And now on to the first one... "Do you have the right e-Learning culture?" by Marc Rosenberg. This should be perfect for me and one of my main responsibilities at work - leading a very 'sit and listen' organization into a new century.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Practicing listening to be a better instructor
Daniel Bixby's article in the April T + D, titled Shut Up and Teach! really activated my former teacher-self. In his article Bixby offers lists (and who doesn't like easy to read lists?) of strategies for trainers to employ with the goal of getting us to stop talking so much (and by extension - purporting ourselves to be THE experts in the room) and listen more to our participants. While I would rate his article as helpful in its own way, I can't help but feel that T + D's audience would have been better off with a richer or deeper look at the theory or pedagogy behind even his first three points.
It is into this void I step.
Without risking a copyright infraction I'll simply list Bixby's first three points under his heading "Listen for better learning" -
Another method that instructors or learning departments can employ is something I've used recently to great success - a pre-course self-assessment. I work with my training providers or vendors to establish measurable learning objectives and I send those objectives to our participants a week or so ahead of time asking them to complete a few tasks. First, they rate themselves, and their prior knowledge, against the objectives. Then I ask them to share experiences and current or expected projects with the instructor so the instructor has a wonderfully detailed heads-up for most of the class even before s/he walks in the door. We all know how much time is spent, on the fly, making adjustments to content and pacing based on what we learn from the participants in those first few hours. With this process in place that guessing game becomes a thing of the past and we all hit the ground running.
All of this, of course, works hand in hand with the fundamental but critical step of linking new knowledge with prior knowledge, building new competencies into existing schema. By assimilating new information into our existing schema, or altering our way of thinking by accommodating new information into new schema, we expand our competencies and make ourselves more productive, well-rounded, and attractive to our organization. It is through the activation of prior knowledge that this transformation begins.
Bixby's next point, "How do they learn?", sent me immediately back to my old texts on Differentiated Instruction. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the art of being able to differentiate instruction, based upon the needs of a diverse audience, is what separates your "everyday" teachers with master teachers. We've all been there - standing in front of 10 or 50 very different people where some are with you, some are bored with your middle of the road style, and some are so confused you can see the glaze in their eyes. Bixby's intent is to encourage us, as leaders of any learning opportunity, to take time out to listen to those participants in order to learn what makes them tick, how they are assimilating or accommodating, and perhaps what we might need to change on the fly to make our session better suited to the audience. I've been around plenty of sessions labeled "fundamental" where experts sign up and vice versa where novices filter into an advanced conversation. We could just stomp our feet and ask them to leave, or we might need to adjust our expectations and differentiate our instruction to bring those different thinkers along for the ride.
This is, of course, extremely difficult to do. It's tough enough for teachers who see the same students day after day for 10 months. If you are leading a 60 minute conference presentation it's an almost impossible task. However, with a firm grasp of adult learning principles, you can set yourself up for a greater likelihood of success. By paying attention to the life experiences your audience are likely to bring with them, and tying the content or new information into those experiences, you're more prone to make the connections between old and new information necessary to succeed. Another way to focus on adults as learners is to take a moment to poll them to find out what they do and match the content to those answers. Making specific references to how the content relates to their work keeps the adult learner engaged and provides a scaffold for that information to be assimilated into the already existing schema of their work. Finally, respecting the adult learner, and showing them that by listening you care about their growth, will provide a sound foundation for a positive experience for all.
The final point of "What did they learn?" is near and dear to me. I've always been interested in assessment and what I've found since coming over from education is that neither side really has it all right. Educators are all over assessment, both summative and formative, but prior to stepping into a pseudo-corporate environment I'd never heard of Kirkpatrick, and I really wish I had. With education being stuck in the industrial-era, the mindset is "we teach, you learn, I test if you've learned, you pass or fail." I think educators could learn a lot from Kirkpatrick and the business community's efforts to evaluate. The goal is not to pass or fail, the goal is to grow everyone and through periodic evaluation and constant feedback this is possible.
Where business could stand to learn a few things is through the concept of continual learning. I've been so frustrated in my current role as I fight against the mindset of "training" as a discrete event. I recently brought up the idea of setting up a periodic check-in with participants from a successful, and expensive, training course. My thought was - our organization paid quite a bit to have 30+ folks attend this class but once it was over they were sent on their merry way. It's a rare occurrence to hear of a supervisor ask his or her staff member to report out on learning and I've never heard of anyone having to detail how they'll incorporate their learning into their work. If the standard was more in line with the continual learning mindset present in education, periodically asking participants to recall what they learned and how they're making use of their new competencies, the return on investment would be far easier to measure.
Bixby's point of spending time listening, while still in the learning event, is critical to starting this process. Creating a baseline of what participants are learning, in real time, allows for much richer follow-up opportunities while it allows for live adjustments to be made in the delivery. In terms supervisors can easily understand, it's much more cost-effective to be able to fix the product before final delivery rather than learn of problems after it's been shipped. A learning opportunity works the same way. I'd much rather learn that something isn't clicking as it happens rather than wait until I can read my level 2 evaluations or hear back from supervisors on a level 3 evaluation (if that ever occurs).
In conclusion, there's much to add to this conversation Bixby started but hopefully I've expanded into some relevant and useful topics. There's much more to be learned, and putting this into practice is extremely difficult as it expects learning leaders to be flexible and open to suggestion - but those are topics Bixby touches on later in his article and too much to go into here...
It is into this void I step.
Without risking a copyright infraction I'll simply list Bixby's first three points under his heading "Listen for better learning" -
- What do they already know?
- How do they learn?
- What did they learn?
Another method that instructors or learning departments can employ is something I've used recently to great success - a pre-course self-assessment. I work with my training providers or vendors to establish measurable learning objectives and I send those objectives to our participants a week or so ahead of time asking them to complete a few tasks. First, they rate themselves, and their prior knowledge, against the objectives. Then I ask them to share experiences and current or expected projects with the instructor so the instructor has a wonderfully detailed heads-up for most of the class even before s/he walks in the door. We all know how much time is spent, on the fly, making adjustments to content and pacing based on what we learn from the participants in those first few hours. With this process in place that guessing game becomes a thing of the past and we all hit the ground running.
All of this, of course, works hand in hand with the fundamental but critical step of linking new knowledge with prior knowledge, building new competencies into existing schema. By assimilating new information into our existing schema, or altering our way of thinking by accommodating new information into new schema, we expand our competencies and make ourselves more productive, well-rounded, and attractive to our organization. It is through the activation of prior knowledge that this transformation begins.
Bixby's next point, "How do they learn?", sent me immediately back to my old texts on Differentiated Instruction. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, the art of being able to differentiate instruction, based upon the needs of a diverse audience, is what separates your "everyday" teachers with master teachers. We've all been there - standing in front of 10 or 50 very different people where some are with you, some are bored with your middle of the road style, and some are so confused you can see the glaze in their eyes. Bixby's intent is to encourage us, as leaders of any learning opportunity, to take time out to listen to those participants in order to learn what makes them tick, how they are assimilating or accommodating, and perhaps what we might need to change on the fly to make our session better suited to the audience. I've been around plenty of sessions labeled "fundamental" where experts sign up and vice versa where novices filter into an advanced conversation. We could just stomp our feet and ask them to leave, or we might need to adjust our expectations and differentiate our instruction to bring those different thinkers along for the ride.
This is, of course, extremely difficult to do. It's tough enough for teachers who see the same students day after day for 10 months. If you are leading a 60 minute conference presentation it's an almost impossible task. However, with a firm grasp of adult learning principles, you can set yourself up for a greater likelihood of success. By paying attention to the life experiences your audience are likely to bring with them, and tying the content or new information into those experiences, you're more prone to make the connections between old and new information necessary to succeed. Another way to focus on adults as learners is to take a moment to poll them to find out what they do and match the content to those answers. Making specific references to how the content relates to their work keeps the adult learner engaged and provides a scaffold for that information to be assimilated into the already existing schema of their work. Finally, respecting the adult learner, and showing them that by listening you care about their growth, will provide a sound foundation for a positive experience for all.
The final point of "What did they learn?" is near and dear to me. I've always been interested in assessment and what I've found since coming over from education is that neither side really has it all right. Educators are all over assessment, both summative and formative, but prior to stepping into a pseudo-corporate environment I'd never heard of Kirkpatrick, and I really wish I had. With education being stuck in the industrial-era, the mindset is "we teach, you learn, I test if you've learned, you pass or fail." I think educators could learn a lot from Kirkpatrick and the business community's efforts to evaluate. The goal is not to pass or fail, the goal is to grow everyone and through periodic evaluation and constant feedback this is possible.
Where business could stand to learn a few things is through the concept of continual learning. I've been so frustrated in my current role as I fight against the mindset of "training" as a discrete event. I recently brought up the idea of setting up a periodic check-in with participants from a successful, and expensive, training course. My thought was - our organization paid quite a bit to have 30+ folks attend this class but once it was over they were sent on their merry way. It's a rare occurrence to hear of a supervisor ask his or her staff member to report out on learning and I've never heard of anyone having to detail how they'll incorporate their learning into their work. If the standard was more in line with the continual learning mindset present in education, periodically asking participants to recall what they learned and how they're making use of their new competencies, the return on investment would be far easier to measure.
Bixby's point of spending time listening, while still in the learning event, is critical to starting this process. Creating a baseline of what participants are learning, in real time, allows for much richer follow-up opportunities while it allows for live adjustments to be made in the delivery. In terms supervisors can easily understand, it's much more cost-effective to be able to fix the product before final delivery rather than learn of problems after it's been shipped. A learning opportunity works the same way. I'd much rather learn that something isn't clicking as it happens rather than wait until I can read my level 2 evaluations or hear back from supervisors on a level 3 evaluation (if that ever occurs).
In conclusion, there's much to add to this conversation Bixby started but hopefully I've expanded into some relevant and useful topics. There's much more to be learned, and putting this into practice is extremely difficult as it expects learning leaders to be flexible and open to suggestion - but those are topics Bixby touches on later in his article and too much to go into here...
Monday, May 2, 2011
Stressing Interaction in a Sit-and-Listen World
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about interaction recently, after reading Hadiya Nuriddin’s piece, “Building the Right Interaction” (registration required) in March’s T+D Magazine. I’ve been considering this topic so much because it’s one of my most daunting challenges at the moment. It's well known that incorporating interactive exercises in learning events increases both learner attentiveness and retention. Wait, sorry, I'll take that back. It's well known by instructional designers, educationalists, learning professionals and the like that providing opportunities for participants to interact with one another, with the content, and with the instructor all have positive benefits. The issue in my environment is that quite infrequently do we have instructional designers, educationalists, or learning professionals providing our learning opportunities. When dealing with high tech, specialized or restricted access topics it is often necessary to locate a vendor or presenter who is beyond reproach in terms of subject matter expertise but lacking in pedagogical understanding. This inevitably leads to a disconnect between the quality of the content and the quality of the delivery.
The audience, I believe, has everything to do with the design of a learning event. In my environment our audiences have been drilled into thinking that sitting passively, absorbing as much as possible from whatever expert happens to be standing in front of them, then regurgitating portions of it later is entirely acceptable. Not only has this process been acceptable, they've all been crowned as the best of the best “sit-and-listeners” so we begin to understand why a different tact might not be encouraged.
Prior to my taking on my position as administrator for high-tech training in my organization there was no one to question the effectiveness or pedagogical appropriateness of the training being provided. We were at the mercy of the expert, regardless of that person's ability, or lack thereof, to design an effective learning event. But (cue the trumpets), now I find myself actively working with our training providers to encourage all sorts of new-fangled learning stuff. Like measurable learning objectives. No, really - the concept of a learning objective as something different than an instructor action is foreign to most of these vendors. Also, and finally returning to the point of this post, the concept of interaction is almost unheard of around these parts.
I've begun working with one of the larger training vendors we use to influence the level of interactive opportunities they provide in their courses. As you might imagine, they are somewhat reluctant to change. Abhorrent is a more appropriate term I think. At first I couldn't understand why an organization that provides an educational service wouldn't want to jump at the chance to positively modify their offerings. Then, I took off my education hat and put on the business hat and realized - why would they want to change what they do when, first of all, the status quo has always been just fine (thank you very much)... and second, modifications cost money! If they can get away with continuing to offer off-the-shelf courses, and these sit-and-listen participants are just fine with it, of course they'd want to do so.
Again, we come back to the audience. I'm noticing a circular trend here. What I need to do is try to affect the audience. To say the least, it’s difficult to convince someone who’s been rewarded for success in a particular environment that there is a need to change that environment. In the end the argument must be made for a shift away from just knowledge and into the skills and abilities portion of competency. It’s a fight worth having.
The audience, I believe, has everything to do with the design of a learning event. In my environment our audiences have been drilled into thinking that sitting passively, absorbing as much as possible from whatever expert happens to be standing in front of them, then regurgitating portions of it later is entirely acceptable. Not only has this process been acceptable, they've all been crowned as the best of the best “sit-and-listeners” so we begin to understand why a different tact might not be encouraged.
Prior to my taking on my position as administrator for high-tech training in my organization there was no one to question the effectiveness or pedagogical appropriateness of the training being provided. We were at the mercy of the expert, regardless of that person's ability, or lack thereof, to design an effective learning event. But (cue the trumpets), now I find myself actively working with our training providers to encourage all sorts of new-fangled learning stuff. Like measurable learning objectives. No, really - the concept of a learning objective as something different than an instructor action is foreign to most of these vendors. Also, and finally returning to the point of this post, the concept of interaction is almost unheard of around these parts.
I've begun working with one of the larger training vendors we use to influence the level of interactive opportunities they provide in their courses. As you might imagine, they are somewhat reluctant to change. Abhorrent is a more appropriate term I think. At first I couldn't understand why an organization that provides an educational service wouldn't want to jump at the chance to positively modify their offerings. Then, I took off my education hat and put on the business hat and realized - why would they want to change what they do when, first of all, the status quo has always been just fine (thank you very much)... and second, modifications cost money! If they can get away with continuing to offer off-the-shelf courses, and these sit-and-listen participants are just fine with it, of course they'd want to do so.
Again, we come back to the audience. I'm noticing a circular trend here. What I need to do is try to affect the audience. To say the least, it’s difficult to convince someone who’s been rewarded for success in a particular environment that there is a need to change that environment. In the end the argument must be made for a shift away from just knowledge and into the skills and abilities portion of competency. It’s a fight worth having.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Playing Make-Believe - a follow-up
It was more difficult than I'd like to admit. One of the most difficult days of my professional career if we're being honest. But, as my colleague wisely pointed out - building new skills isn't typically easy to do. So I swallowed whatever was holding me back and I did it. I turned my back on my fear/inability/distrust of playing make-believe, locked myself in a training room, and delivered a presentation to a room full of empty chairs about 27 times until I got it pretty close to perfect.
And it was damn hard to do.
What I learned was that this style of presentation - a very scripted or prescribed style - is not what I would choose or look forward to. My natural style is one that includes a lot of interaction (which I believe will be the topic of my next post), playing off the audience, talking with them rather than to them. Sharing what I know and learning what they know is what makes any presentation fun for me. And I believe that's the key - fun. I want to be having fun when I'm standing in front of a group of people. I can't help but feel that if I'm not having fun then how or why could they be having fun and if they're not having fun then why the hell would they want to spend their time with me?
Deep breath.
So I continue to learn. It's not always about fun. Sometimes, as was the case as I presented the results of a survey to some very senior folks, it's just about the information. I know the data, they need to know the data, my 30 minutes in front of them is dedicated to taking what's in my brain and putting it in theirs. Not much fun but critical to the organization. Did I try to inject levity and personality into the conversation? Of course, not to do that would be asking too much. But I'm learning that balance and in my new, non-academic, environment the balance is much different than I've ever been used to.
And it was damn hard to do.
What I learned was that this style of presentation - a very scripted or prescribed style - is not what I would choose or look forward to. My natural style is one that includes a lot of interaction (which I believe will be the topic of my next post), playing off the audience, talking with them rather than to them. Sharing what I know and learning what they know is what makes any presentation fun for me. And I believe that's the key - fun. I want to be having fun when I'm standing in front of a group of people. I can't help but feel that if I'm not having fun then how or why could they be having fun and if they're not having fun then why the hell would they want to spend their time with me?
Deep breath.
So I continue to learn. It's not always about fun. Sometimes, as was the case as I presented the results of a survey to some very senior folks, it's just about the information. I know the data, they need to know the data, my 30 minutes in front of them is dedicated to taking what's in my brain and putting it in theirs. Not much fun but critical to the organization. Did I try to inject levity and personality into the conversation? Of course, not to do that would be asking too much. But I'm learning that balance and in my new, non-academic, environment the balance is much different than I've ever been used to.
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