Applied Learning Theory 101: Matching Delivery to Learning Preferences


Remember that you are targeting a wide audience and that your participants will have widely different preferences for how they acquire knowledge. To the extent you can, try to appeal to as many of these preferences as possible.

  • Slides and materials. The PowerPoint files included in this book are intentionally minimalist in design. Too many workshops consist of an endless series of densely filled slides that are both difficult to read and tedious to try to cover in a classroom setting. Some of your audience will not mind this sort of presentation, but most will find such workshop formats intolerable. For your visual learners, have handouts or additional reading lists available, but keep your workshop materials simple and concentrated on your key learning objectives.

  • Lecture, discussion, and debriefing. Your interaction with the class is in many ways a dialogue wherein you and your participants exchange ideas and solve problems relating to their project management learning needs. This is the place where you turn the workshop into a living experience, as you relate the materials and activities to the experiences and concerns of your learners. As with everything else about training, balance is everything. If you do not add this valuable component to the workshop, it will remain more or less a ‚“canned ‚½ presentation. On the other hand, if you allow discussions to drag out endlessly or subject your learners to ‚“death by lecture, ‚½ you will have destroyed all the potential benefits of dialogue. The suggested timings for the workshops in this book reflect my belief that presentations, lectures, and discussions need to be carefully timed to maintain learner interest and maximize the impact of each verbal interaction.

  • Individual activities. Students need time to think and work individually to better process at least some of learning content in your workshops. In some cases, these needs may be met with simple questionnaires that allow participants to provide background information that can help you better facilitate the workshop. In others, participants will be working through a series of questions that will help prepare them for an upcoming discussion or a shared small group activity. Still others may be individual exercises, self-assessments, or puzzles that allow practice of new skills acquired in the workshop. Your biggest challenge with these activities lies in the fact that people tend to work at different paces and you don ‚ t want to have some participants finishing an exercise early and having to wait for the slower individuals to finish. For this reason, the individual exercises in this book have intentionally been kept short so you can more easily pace your workshop participants. If you add individual exercises to those in the book, you may want to follow the same practice. And, once again, it will be important to include an ample number of individual exercises but not have so many that your workshop begins to look like a study hall. Just as important, you will want to have a debriefing or small group discussion after each of these exercises. In the workshops in this book, you ‚ ll find several sequences of individual learning activities that lead to small group discussion or exercise and end with a general debriefing for the entire group.

  • Small-group activities. The small group activities in workshops often are where your participants have the greatest opportunity to practice new skills and reinforce learning through team interaction. Collaborative activities help your participants to learn and fill in the gaps for one another in applying newly acquired concepts and tools. Small-group activities present an especially difficult challenge to you as a facilitator ‚ even more than the one presented by individual activities. Timing will be important to make certain all groups stay ‚“on the same page ‚½ in working through an exercise or case study. Your debriefing of these activities will be especially critical to the success of the activities in particular and to the workshop in general. Don ‚ t be surprised to find groups differing in their conclusions, and try as much as possible to capitalize on the differences as a spring-board for in-depth discussion of the various issues raised. If you do this well, you will turn your workshop into a true forum for the exchange of ideas and make it much more relevant to your participants.

Through a judicious mix of these four major elements, you will go a long way toward meeting the various needs of your learning audience, whether their primary learning style involves reading, listening, or doing (individually and in groups).




Project Management Training
Project Management Training (ASTD Trainers Workshop)
ISBN: 1562863649
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 111

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