Make Your Training More Interactive and Raise Learning Effectiveness

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. Many of us know intuitively that this is true. We know that the key to acquiring real knowledge is only learned when it becomes one with us at a deeper level. Any yet, much training within companies is still lecture based, with numerous PowerPoint slides filled with text. The trainer often just reads that text to his bored audience – who after ten minutes, are no longer paying attention.

In addition, there is rarely any chance to practice numerous times until competency is reached, not to mention any assessment with feedback of what was supposedly learned.

In our Train the Trainer Courses in English (in Germany) we see effective training, and by extension, effective learning, resting upon three pillars: 1. Topic relevancy; 2. A course structure that follows the learning structure of the mind; 3. Relevant activities along each step of the structure.

How does this work in practice? First, people do not learn unless they see there is some relevancy in their lives to what they are learning. So a trainer needs to show how what is being learned is relevant for the learner. Relevancy is the ignition that starts the motor of learning. Secondly, learners have a basic structure in their cognitive apparatus that requires a similar set-up in the way a seminar is taught. This classroom structure was based on the educational theories of David Kolb. He focused on holistic perspective of experiential learning and found that effective learning proceeds through a series of four stages – which many educational practitioners then tweaked and developed classroom structures along his model. They included 1. Concrete experience (often at the beginning as a type of knowledge or skills gap-analysis. After that came the second stage in the cycle, reflection (2) of the experience (what is known, and what still needs to be learned (2a – new input). After new input comes the anchoring of those new concepts or skills (usually through some kind of repeated practice or test, and this then culminates in step 4,  in applying what was learned to a realistic situation.

At each stage of Kolb’s cycle learners should be engaged with the material in some way. This may include group activities, learning reinforcement-games and simulations, or just hands-on practice with whatever is being learned.

The classroom training structure that follows this cycle is based in practical experience. It emerged from an intuitive understanding of how real learning takes place in the real world. Kolb simply made it explicit. In all areas of life, from health-care workers, home-builders, airplane pilots, bus drivers, teachers, etc., we all expect that those engaging in these activities are properly trained. And by trained we mean that they should have had lots of practice, not just in theory, but in actually “doing”.  And they should do it until they are competent in the skill they are learning. Likewise, in company training programs this should also be the norm. Training needs to become much more hands-on, with intensive practice in the topics being learned. It also needs to be tested – which not only provides feedback to the learner, but to the trainer too - who can then measure the effectiveness of his or her training methods. However, this is often not the case in numerous company training programs. There is too little practice (until competency is reached) and almost no testing whatsoever. Rather, the trainer comes in, boots up his laptop, and begins to present his PowerPoint (mostly text) slides.

At the International Presentation Academy, we offer a Train the Trainer workshop in Germany that will guide you through a step-by-step process in developing your own interactive training module. Our Train the Trainer Course in Gemrany, will show you how to structure you seminar for maximum effectiveness, develop easy-to use interactive tests, as well as guide you through a hands-on approach at creating game and simulation activities.  And finally, you will create an audio PowerPoint presentation (during the workshop) that you can use as classroom input or as pre-seminar preparation for your own training.

Our Train the Trainer Seminar in English (in Germany) is appropriate for those who train soft skills of every kind as well as technical skills. We will engage you with the topic from beginning to end – using a completely hands-on approach. Indeed, we employ the very methods we advocate. We invite you to contact us for an in-house quote at: info@ip-academy.de