Quotable: Jessica Matthews
You are only done learning when you've decided that you're done learning.
Quotable: Jessica Mathews, CEO and co-founder of SOccket
US Government helping young people get prepared with employable skills
The US Department of Labor will award a total of $2 billion over the next four years through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program. Grants will support the development and improvement of post-secondary programs of two years or less that use evidence-based or innovative strategies to prepare students for successful careers in growing and emerging industries.
Textbooks reduced to 140 characters (kidding, but interesting article)
A study released this month from Michigan State University discovered that courses that engage students on Twitter may actually see higher interaction and better grades. In the report, "Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literary Practice," Christine Greenhow, a Michigan State professor and co-author of the study, found that students who were actively engaging with classmates and the instructor on Twitter were more interested in the course material-and ultimately received higher grades.
“The students get more engaged because they feel it is connected to something real, that it's not just learning for the sake of learning," Greenhow said in a press release. "It feels authentic to them."
By integrating Twitter in her English courses, and through her research, Greenhow, and her collaborator, Michigan State professor Benjamin Gleason, found that students seemed to engage more with one another on Twitter than in the classroom. Greenhow and Gleason concluded in the study that students who use Twitter for academic reasons gain the ability to write succinctly, stay up to date on current research, and also benefit from connecting with academic experts directly.
"Our synthesis suggests that students and teachers might benefit when Twitter is used as a 'backchannel' for communication within or between classes," the authors wrote. "Instructors and students can use Twitter to ask and answer questions, brainstorm, focus or extend in-class discussions, help students connect, collaboratively generate information, and learn concise writing styles."
See the whole article here.
Spicing Up Your Classroom Training - an interview with Matthea Marquart
T/D: We're very excited to talk to you about Spicing Up Your Classroom Training - what is the rationale for spicing up classroom training with interactive activities?
Marquart: The ultimate goal of training is to change behavior. In order to change behavior you need to give your learners an understanding of what new skills you want them to apply. Then you want to support them in being able to practice applying those new skills. Just knowing information is not enough. For example, I know that I need to exercise several times a week, but that doesn't translate into my always doing it.
When you think about that concept with classroom training you know that you really need to support the learner and appeal to all the different learning styles because not everyone learns the same way. When you want to spice up classroom training you want to increase their motivation to learn and their engagement. You want to make sure that they're actually awake, you want to make sure they're paying attention and really support the learners by chunking information into manageable pieces that they can get their heads around. All of that makes spicing up classroom training with interactive activities really important rather than something that's kind of fun to do.
T/D: Well said!. For the trainers who don't have a lot of time to re-write their workshops, could you share some quick ways to spice up training? Usually they use a basic PowerPoint presentation - how can they spice those up?
Marquart: That’s a great question. There’s nothing wrong with a PowerPoint presentation as a supplemental aid to training.. But when that's the whole training - you lower the lights for a long PowerPoint presentation and suddenly everyone goes to sleep or zones out, they're not going to learn the information that you want them to learn.
If you don’t have a lot of time to completely change the whole thing, work with those PowerPoint presentations and print out the slides. If you create several sets of them, you can do a number of different interactive activities. For example, you could take the slides, tape them up to the walls and put blank flip chart paper underneath the slides. Then just let everyone go ahead and read the slides on their own and react by writing questions or comments underneath the flipchart paper. Then you as a facilitator can go work with those comments and questions and that really gets people a little bit more in-depth into the content.
You could also break into groups and give each of them a set of the slides along with a question sheet so that they can do a scavenger hunt for information within the slides. Or you could give sections of the presentation to different groups so that they can teach parts of the presentation to the whole group. Another option would be to give them sections that are jumbled and ask them to put them in order. That really gets folks focusing on new information and really paying attention to the content, rather than just zoning out while someone in the front of the room goes through the material for them.
T/D: They get active instead of passive - that's great.
Marquart: Exactly, we want them to apply the content on the job so getting them to physically work with the ideas and process them cognitively is really important
T/D: When management or subject matter experts insist on giving lectures rather than facilitating they just want to get up there and talk. What are some quick and easy ways that we can help them to get their lectures more interactive?
Marquart: Great question. Sometimes people really believe in lectures, but we've got the same risks where people stop paying attention. That means we're not meeting our goals of changing behavior. What you can do is work with that subject matter, expert or management to turn a giant lecture into a series of mini-lectures by building in pauses for discussion.
If you build in pauses for discussion you can do things such as a “think, pair, share” where you ask a question and have everyone think about the answer silently for 30 seconds or 60 seconds. Then have them partner with someone next to them and discuss it. Then you've got two points where people are thinking about the question. Then if you have a couple of people share it with the large group you've got three points at which people think about the question and they're actively working with the information rather than passively sitting there.
When you break those large lectures into a series of very short lectures you can create visual aids for the main points in those chunks. For example, simple things are if you come up with three main points for a section of a lecture just do a quick triangle and write those three points at the points of the triangle. Or, if it's five points you could do a star or a hand, four points you could do a box sectioned into four. If it's points that build on each other you could draw a little staircase so you can see that they build on each other. That helps people who need a visual aid understand the concept a little bit better and it'll also increase the likelihood that they can retain the information. If they remember what the information is – then we increase the likelihood that they can apply it.
If you're already doing a good job of building interactions, but the monotony starts to creep in, you run the risk of people not paying attention. You can use movement to get the energy up.
Play games to get people into pairs. For example, if they have cards that have a match somewhere in the room then they have to mingle and talk to other people in order to find their partner to discuss a question with. If you want to do something pretty quick, you could say, stand up and find a partner who's on the opposite side of the room from you..
One thing that I like to do is have people stand back-to-back rather than facing each other so they don't have the distraction of looking at another person just yet. They’re standing back to back when I ask a question, then I have them take a couple of deep breaths and think about the answer and only turn around when they're ready to answer the question and discuss it with their partner. That serves the purpose of getting people up and moving, getting them actually thinking about the question. Sometimes people just need to breathe a little bit to get their energy up. That is a very quick and easy way to get people doing the same pair discussion but in a way that adds a little bit of variety.
If it's group discussions that are getting a little bit monotonous, write flip charts with questions ahead of time and place them around the room so they're already posted. If they're placed around the room away from where people are sitting then people actually have to stand up and move over to where the flip charts are to do the question discussion. That is going to make them get their blood going, shake them up a little bit so that they're not just sitting there. That also adds a little bit of variety as well, even if it's still the same concept of pair or group discussions. Changing up a little bit will give it a feel of having a lot of variety.
T/D: These are wonderful, easy ideas to implement without having to change your design at all. Thank you so much! Do you have any last tidbits you'd like to share to help us spice up classroom training?
Marquart: I definitely want to encourage people to keep their eyes on the ultimate goal of changing behavior. So any kind of spicing up that we do shouldn't be just for laughs or just to have a little bit of fun, we've got to keep in mind that we want people to apply their new skills on the job. Everything should be related to doing that. There really is a strong rationale and purpose to spicing up those classroom trainings.
Matthea Marquart is the Director of Training from BELL - Building Educated Leaders for Life. She has written many training-related articles and a dozen have been published in T&D Magazine, Training Magazine's web edition and Learn Magazine. She has been recognized by Training Magazine as a young trainer to watch - an honor recognizing accomplished leaders in the training field. Along with being a member of the American Society of Training and Development she was also a past President of the National Organization for Women and has been a volunteer teacher in the New York school system. You can contact her mattheamarquart@gmail.com.
Tips for online learning
A recent Edudemic article titled 20+ Tips from the Most Effective Online Teachers provides a wealth of good information, not only for those who are teaching online, but also for those organizations that are considering offering courses online. For all the business factors that make distance learning or virtual learning a plus - there are some weighty considerations as well.
We highly recommend reading the full article - it will really give you something to think about. If you don't have time - here are a few of the things we consider to be "gems" in the article:
What the students can teach each other is just as important as what the instructor teaches
Online does not mean easy
Online courses take much more time to develop and facilitate than classroom courses
Being an online educator is more a life style than an occupation
Be proactive about course management
Quotable: Bob Pike
Instructor-led, participant-centered training is about involving participants in every way possible in the learning process. The more participants are involved in the content, the greater the retention and application.
Quotable: Bob Pike, Creative Training Techniuqes
Quotable: Michael Rosenthal
For the most part, adults learn skills through action and reflection. One can't learn to swim by simply reading a book or attending a lecture, despite the presenter's mastery of language, PowerPoint, or multimedia. Instead, the learner has to get in the water and practice. They refine their breathing and strokes by experiencing and correcting for coughing, sinking, and inefficiency. The same holds true for amost any skill improvement - it's how we learn.
Quotable: Michael Rosenthal, Managing Partner of Consensus
Incentivize your training - a great model
On September 29 a concert was held in New York City's Central Park to bring awareness to worldwide issues such as disease, poverty and lack of drinking water.
The concert was free and 60,000 people attended BUT they had to earn the right to attend. First, they had to register at a website. Then, they had to earn points to get in to a lottery to be awarded the free tickets. They earned points by watching various videos on the issues above and / or then forwarding those important messages to their friends via Facebook or Twitter.
What a GREAT model for making your training viral! Especially when you are constrained by having to disseminate your learning through asynchronous methods (in other words, people will engage in the learning on their own time and schedule). Why not have prizes or awards for completing the training and certain tasks along the way?
If you'd like to read more about the concert, click here
Your "smart phone" will make you dumber
Have you ever obligingly followed your GPS even though you were pretty sure it was steering you wrong (pun intended)? Have you ever followed your GPS to a location and, shortly thereafter, when you had to return, you realized you needed the GPS to do it?
While having the technology to save us time and save us from mistakes is wonderful, it also "saves us" from having to think. The more we don't have to think, the less capable we become of it.
Here is a simple experiment: pretend you are teaching how to tell time, on a clock. to a 7 year old. We have become so used to digital displays of time - on our microwave, cable box, telephone and car dash - that it is a struggle to explain how the hands and the numbers on a dial indicate the time. And that is just one, very simple, example.
More and more in our professional journals we see articles about mobile technology. With every person (practically) in possession of a smart phone or tablet, the field of training is increasingly obsessed with ways to "push" information and answers to the learner, rather than teaching people how to think, investigate, reason or create an answer on their own.
Smart devices may save us time in the short term, but in the long run, they will hobble our learners' ability to actually learn.
Don't forget to cut of the ends of the ham!
Are you familiar with the story of the woman who, for years, cut off the ends of her ham before baking? When her daughter asked her why, she replied, "That's what MY mother always did." When the granddaughter asked the grandmother why she cut the ends off the ham, the grandmother replied, "Because my pan was too small to fit a large ham." <insert chuckle here>
Seems we have experienced the same phenomenon in e-Learning. We've been forced, all these decades, to create "click next to continue" e-Learning because of constraints of Flash and the fact that the scroll wheel on the mouse had not yet been invented.
Now, with the advent of "drag your finger down," technology, the format of e-Learning is ready to be set free from its 800 x 600 box.I
nteresting insight here - quick read.
Educational achievement in the US goes down
The US ranked fourth-worst among 29 developed countries for children obtaining a higher level of education than their parents, According to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In the US, only 21.6% of those 25 - 34 years old achieved a higher level of education than their parents. That compares to the OECD average of 36.8%.
Source: WSJ.com
We are obsessed with time - let's embrace that
Apparently we are obsessed with time - how to save it, how not to waste it.
Just this week we saw two new book titles:T weet this! Manage your Twitter account in 30 minutes a day or less, and Learn Marketing with Social Media in 7 Days
Both books immediately grabbed our attention. Wow! That sounds easy! quick! do-able!
Sooooo what's the lesson we can learn from this?
Answer: What a great way to market our training! Don't just title your class "PowerPoint for Beginners," name it "Be a PowerPoint Pro by Tomorrow!" Instead of "Executive Coaching Conversations," name it "Quick Hit Feedback Tips for Unbeatable Performance."
Quotable: Fletcher Kittredge
Given the ever increasing rate of change, companies need to structure themselves so that they can adapt quickly to changing conditions. It is neither practical nor economical to be constantly hiring new employees to meet the new needs caused by rapid change. The only feasible strategy is to hire talented people of good character and constantly train them in new skills. Education and training will have to be a fundamental competency of any company that wants to be successful over the next decade.
Quotable: Fletcher Kittredge CEO and founder of GWI
How much do you really know about learning?
Parade Magazine recently had an informative back-to-school quiz focused on learning facts. Follow this link to see how much you really know. After you answer each question it will tell you the research behind the answer. We'll give you a few clues because they are important to training:
Testing doesn't simply measure what you know-it reinforces what you know, says psychologist Henry Roediger III, Ph.D., of Washington University in St. Louis. Every time you summon facts from memory, you strengthen your brain's hold on the material. (Editor's Note: this is why, at The Training Doctor, we always say that the quiz is just the final part of the learning process.)
Research on what's known as the "spacing effect" shows that we form stronger and more lasting memories by exposing ourselves to information over time. Repeated cycles of learning, consolidating, and then re-encountering material fix it firmly in our minds.
It's much more effective to "interweave" different types of problems - mixing them up so you learn how to quickly identify which approach is needed to solve each one. For example, a study of baseball batters found that when different types of pitches - fastballs, curveballs, sinkers-were mixed up unpredictably during practice, the players became more adept at scoring a hit.