Trainers Tip 167 - 4 Stages Of Creating Learner Centred Content That Sticks (Part 2 of 4)

Tip 166 Looked at Stage 1 of the Learning Cycle. This tip moves us along to

Stage 2 – Presenting The Content

This stage should take around 20% of the time allocated for this piece of content. After all, we want learners to be able to perform the new skill or apply the new knowledge, not just hear about it.

During this stage, your purpose is one or more of the following:

• Give learners a positive first encounter with the content.
• Start to get learners involved with the content.
• Keep the content real by linking it back to your learners real world.

and

• Avoiding Death By PowerPoint or Lecture

"The facilitator's role is to initiate the learning process and then get out of the way" John Warren

So how do we do the above? Here are 3 ideas to get you started:

Technique 1 - Learners Present To Each Other

• Divide your content into 3 logical pieces. Maybe it's:
  -3 steps of a process
  -3 different products eg financial products
  -3 different departments eg for an induction workshop
  -3 different features or screens of an IT system or software

The four step process is:

Step 1

• Ask learners to form 3 teams. The number of learners per team doesn't matter - although the 3 teams should have roughly the same number of learners.
• Offer an overview of the content eg the process, system, products etc
  
  
  

Step 2

• Hand out the 3 pieces of content giving each team a different piece.
• Ask learners to work together to pick out key pieces of information and to help each other either perform the skill or apply the knowledge.
• Allow 10-15 minutes.
• Ask learners to work in their teams to devise how to teach this skill or knowledge to other learners in the group. Tell them that each team member will be teaching this content to another learner in the room.
• Allow 10 minutes.

Step 3

• Give each team a number eg team 1, 2 and 3
• Ask learners to form new teams. Each team must consist of at least one team 1 member, one team 2 member and one team 3 member. If there are more than one member from each team that's fine. (If you have 2 or more 1's, 2's and 3's per new team, you might want to consider breaking this into 2 teams).
• Ask the team 1 members to teach the other people in their new team the skill or knowledge they have just learned.
• This is then repeated for team members 2 and 3. Each person has now taught what they learned and learned what other team members had uncovered.

Step 4

• Bring the group back together and summarise the new content or create a task where learners need to demonstrate their new skill or knowledge.
• Here you really have facilitated the learning rather than taught the content. Because your learners did all the work, you can be sure that it's more memorable and that the learning has more chance to stick.

Technique 2 - Learners Uncover Content Themselves

• Let learners know that the way they will uncover the information is via a Press Conference. Each team becomes a team of journalists that need to find out about the topic to ultimately complete a task eg team 1 might produce a TV commercial, team 2 might write an article for the internal newsletter, team 3 might draw a poster that captures key ideas etc. Allow 10 minutes for teams to devise questions around the topic area to get the information they need to complete their task. Hold a press conference and answer questions. Teams then use the information they gathered to produce their output. Each team can present their TV commercial, newsletter article etc.

Technique 3 - Use Other Media

Use other input sources rather than yourself for offering content such as:

• Video clips
• Film clips
• An eLearning module
• A website link
• A YouTube clip that introduces the idea/concept - eg the power of words http://bit.ly/n3dEPb Also, try VideoJug as another rich video clip resource http://www.videojug.com
• A newspaper or magazine article
• A book

Call To Action

Your turn now. If you're following along, you will be working on a piece of content you want to design/re-design and have re-designed the preparation phase. Now apply these new ideas to your content for the presentation phase. Now it's time for your learners to practice using their new skill or applying knowledge; which we'll do in the next tip.