Training

It’s not about training

It’s not really about training.  It’s all about learning. And that means putting the learner at the centre of the event, and being really clear about what learning is supposed to be taking place, and how that learning relates to and builds on their prior experience, and how they will use what they learn in the future.

And that means that if you want to monitor the results of the training, you are going to need something a bit more substantial than a smily-face feedback sheet.

It’s definitely not about powerpoint

We all know that people learn by doing – but creating a learning environment in which people learn through practising, getting things wrong, improving them, getting them better – this requires a degree of reflection and effort that many trainers appear not to be bothered with.  The result is death by powerpoint.  I don’t allow that.

It is about partnership

This infographic shows a good-practice adult learning environment, with the learner at the centre.  Along the top we see the agreements between the key stakeholders; along the bottom, the foundation on which the learning environment rests.

Five areas of practice surround the learner – five areas in which those commissioning the training and the facilitator must work together to ensure high quality and appropriate outcomes.  If any of these areas are missing, the opportunities for learning are undermined.

Immediately surrounding the central learner, there is reference to the level of the course content: it must provide a scaffolding to stretch the learner, allowing them to grow and develop.  Like Goldilocks’ porridge: not too hot and not too cold.

And it is about reflection and improvement

It’s critical that as practitioners we are willing to practise what we preach – to develop meaningful monitoring tools and use them to course-correct and ensure we deliver, and effective evaluation tools which help us to improve.  The bottom right section of the previous infographic shows  Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation – reapplied to the learning environment.  Here is the front page of a comprehensive, interactive PDF self-assessment tool used before and at the end of the FERST training, again after a few months, and finally after a year – which considers both content learning and practical application, and which covers the first three of Kirkpatrick’s four levels.

The traditional smiley face evaluation, by comparison, covers only the first (and doesn’t usually do that very well)

the following consultancies all involved training and learning

Response Option Analysis – Sindh Province, Pakistan

2017 – Facilitator for FAO and the Food Security Working Group
Conduct a response option analysis to consider responses to floods and drought in Jamshoro, Umerkot and Tharparkar districts of Sindh Province, Pakistan