Is Your Training Effective?

Part 4 of a Four-Part Series

Training is used to improve skills and increase competencies in order to drive out variance that reduces performance. Everybody uses some form of training. How do you know if your training is effective?

Lecturing to Transfer Information

The most commonly used method for transferring information in education today is the lecture. But is the lecture method the best at transferring information?

The lecture method was established many, many years ago as a teaching process where the teacher read important passages from a book or text and then explained the passages to the students. Each student was expected to sit, listen and take notes.

Today the presenter stands in front of a room and reads and explains the text from a PowerPoint presentation projected onto a wall or screen. The rest of the room is expected to sit, listen, and take notes. Not much has changed in the last few centuries;

Why the Lecture Process Fails

Lecturing is a passive, one-way method with no real two-way discussion occurring, maybe some questioning and virtually no immediate use of the material being presented, which makes it one of the worst teaching methods ever devised. Lecturing requires the listener to fill in the learning gaps created by a lecture oriented presentation. Lecturing does not try to obtain any buy-in from the listener. So why do we lecture? Because:

• Your presenter probably teaches the same way they were taught as students.
• Lecturing is easier for the presenter than having to spend time trying to understand why the student is not learning.
• The presenter knows no other way.

Lecturing is all about the presenter and not the student. It is the perfect example of a ballistic process explained in our discussion of procedure control. Little to no feedback is required in a lecture. The presenter knows the material so their job is to present.

The student does not know the material so their job is to listen and learn. If the student does not understand then the student failed to do their job either listening or learning and therefore, the students is at fault. Fix the student. The student should repeat the material or obtain additional tutoring (rework). Is it any wonder that students dislike lectures?

People Learn by Doing

People learn by doing, nobody learns much by listening or reading only. Would you want your surgeon to operate on you if their only learning experience was lecture? Lecture feeds the mind, ears and the eyes a little bit, but the surgeon is using their hands. So how do you train the surgeon’s hands? You train by doing actual operations, preferably in a controlled learning environment that is safe to learn in.

What Makes Learning More Effective?

Interaction is the key. Student-to-student interaction, student-to-teacher interactions, and teacher-to-teacher interaction. The more the interaction the better the learning. All three interactions need to occur within an effective learning environment. Interactions include: two-way communication, question and answer, group/team events, demonstrations, case studies, problem-solving activities, games, student presentation, positive feedback, reinforcement and reviewing results through discussion.

Student-to-Student Interaction

When students interact with each other they are forced to use the information, moving the information into their long term memory, and retaining it for future use. If you think about it, a room of people is collectively smarter than any one person. We want to harness the collective intelligence of the room and focus it on the task at hand. A focused room of interacting students is a more powerful training device than a one-way lecture.

Student-to-Teacher Interaction

The teacher can be a powerful facilitator. The teacher has a lot of information on the topic and can direct students to the most important information faster than the students would potentially find on their own.

So the teacher should use their seat of power to question the students, ensure students take notes, form good learning teams, and introduce good learning exercises in order to create an excellent learning environment. The idea is to provide less lecture time and more interaction time. Something like 15 minutes of lecture to 45 minutes of exercise is a good ratio.

Teacher-to-Teacher Interaction

The teacher is not an island. In order to keep improving the teacher needs to interact with other teachers, question teacher performance, attend train-the-trainer workshops and continue to learn how to be a better teacher. Teachers should audit each other teacher’s activities to provide additional feedback.

This week we have discussed how to make your training more effective by using less lecture time and more interaction time. Next week we will discuss Deming’s Learning Loop, also know as PDCA and how to increase your training performance.

Learn more about developing policies, procedures and processes, or improving your organization by attending the next How to create well-defined processes or ISO 9000 Lead Auditor training classes.

Part 1: Is Your Training Effective?
Part 2: How to Increase Your Training Performance
Part 3: How do People Learn?
Part 4: Learning is Not All in Your Head

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Posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2005 under Quality Training

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Originally published by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Is Your Training Effective?.

This and more articles like this can be found at www.bizmanualz.com. This article may be reprinted freely as long as this resource box is left intact.